Bridlepark Fort, Knockdoocunna, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
One of the more quietly peculiar things about this ringfort in County Clare is that its eastern side is not round.
Where most ringforts, the enclosed circular or oval farmsteads built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, follow a consistent curve, the bank here has been flattened along one stretch to form a straight edge, apparently to align with an older field boundary. The result is a shape that sits somewhere between a circle and a polygon, a detail that does not announce itself dramatically but that rewards a closer look at the ground.
The enclosure measures 24 metres across in both directions and is defined by an earthen and stone bank, standing roughly 0.9 metres on its outer face and just over half a metre on the interior. Thorn trees have taken root along the top of the bank, and one large specimen has toppled inward at the north-west, its root mass still attached. There is no clear trace of an outer fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such banks, though a large depression against the northern bank may point to a different kind of past activity altogether. The 25-inch Ordnance Survey map records a limekiln, a stone structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, that once stood roughly 80 metres to the south-west in the same field, and the depression may represent quarrying that fed it. The fort appears on the 1840 edition of the six-inch OS map as a circular enclosure and was named Bridlepark Fort on all subsequent historic mapping, a name that has stuck even as the surrounding pasture was improved and the field boundaries around it shifted. The interior today slopes gently to the south-west and is carpeted in dead nettles.