At around 35 metres across, it is large enough to have once served a deliberate purpose, yet its drystone wall, ranging from just 30 centimetres to 80 centimetres wide and rarely exceeding a metre in height, is so similar in character to the ordinary field boundaries around it that the whole thing could easily be dismissed as a particularly old paddock. That tension between the ordinary and the possibly significant is what makes it worth a second look.

Drystone enclosures of this kind are scattered across the west of Ireland, and their origins can be difficult to pin down without excavation. Some are early medieval, used as farmsteads or enclosures for livestock or grain storage; others are considerably older, associated with prehistoric settlement or ritual. The irregular circumference of this one hints that it was shaped as much by the underlying geology as by human intention. Running through the centre is a broad north-to-south rock fold, and to the east there is a large gryke, a term for the deep natural fissure that forms in limestone when rainwater slowly dissolves the joints in the rock. Clare sits on a vast limestone plain, and the karst topography here means that the land itself is constantly asserting its presence beneath the soil, shaping what can be built and where.