Enclosure, Aughavinna, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
An earthwork sitting in the rough pasture and boggy undergrowth of Aughavinna has spent decades resisting easy classification.
Surrounded by high hills on all sides, it is the kind of site that accumulates conflicting identities: marked as a barrow on Tim Robinson's 1977 map, then listed as a ringfort in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, and visible today in satellite imagery as something that fits neither label quite comfortably.
What aerial and satellite photography has revealed, across multiple surveys between 2011 and 2018, is a subcircular to subrectangular enclosure measuring roughly 24.5 metres across in both its east-north-east to west-south-west and north-north-west to south-south-east axes, defined by a low grass-covered bank. The ambiguity of its form is itself informative. A barrow is typically a burial mound, while a ringfort, the most common field monument in Ireland, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, usually defended by an earthen bank and ditch. That this enclosure has been assigned to both categories at different times suggests its surface features alone are not enough to settle the question, and no excavation record appears to exist to resolve it. It occupies an in-between space, geographically and archaeologically, in a landscape where the terrain itself seems to have preserved the site largely by making it inconvenient to disturb.