Enclosure, Aillwee, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Aillwee, Co. Clare

On a stretch of elevated rough pasture in Aillwee, County Clare, a low circular wall barely announces itself above the grass.

It is easy to miss, yet it is part of something considerably older and more deliberate than the surrounding landscape first suggests: an ancient enclosure sitting within the remains of an extensive field system, the whole ensemble quietly preserved beneath centuries of turf and grazing.

The enclosure is subcircular, roughly twenty metres in diameter, and defined by a stone wall that has long since been absorbed into the ground, its profile now a gentle grassed-over ridge. What makes it particularly interesting are the slab walls that radiate outward from it, one running to the east and one to the south, as though the enclosure once served as an organising node within a wider arrangement of land use. A cashel, which is a type of stone-walled ringfort typically associated with early medieval farming settlement, lies around eighty-five metres to the south-east, suggesting this part of Aillwee was once a managed and inhabited landscape rather than the open rough pasture it appears today. The site was noted by Ros Ó Maoldúin.

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Pete F
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