It is not the kind of industrial relic that tends to attract much attention, but its presence here points to a very specific moment in the Clare landscape, when someone needed a great many bricks and decided to make them on the spot.

The excavation, carried out under licence in advance of road construction, dated the feature to the post-medieval period, and the most likely explanation ties it to Manus House nearby, which has brickwork consistent with construction in the later eighteenth or earlier nineteenth century. Building in brick was still relatively uncommon in rural Ireland at that time, and the cost and difficulty of transporting materials over any distance made on-site production a practical choice for an estate project of that scale. The clamp at Manusmore, if the association holds, would represent the unglamorous industrial back-end of what eventually became a dressed, finished building: the place where the raw material was produced before the architects and craftsmen took over.