Enclosure, Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare

On a north-facing slope in the Burren's karst limestone country, a small drystone enclosure sits quietly within a field system that has been in use across multiple periods of human activity.

What makes it worth pausing over is not dramatic scale but the layered ordinariness of it: roughly subcircular, measuring about 26 metres north to south and 23.5 metres east to west, it was substantial enough to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842 and again in the 1916 edition of their six-inch series, yet it remains largely unknown beyond the surrounding farmland.

The enclosure is defined by a drystone wall, built without mortar in the tradition common throughout the west of Ireland, standing between 0.8 and 1.3 metres in height externally. On the eastern side, a section of double-facing survives over about seven metres, meaning the wall here was constructed with two parallel stone faces rather than a single skin, giving it greater solidity and width. Along the interior base of the wall, from the south-west round to the north and continuing to the south-east, there is a grass-covered spread of stones lying low to the ground, likely the collapsed or deliberately laid remnant of an earlier phase of the structure. Field walls branch off from the enclosure at the east, south-south-west, and north-west, connecting it physically to the broader multiperiod field system that surrounds it, suggesting it was not a freestanding feature but one element in an organised agricultural landscape whose full history remains incompletely understood. The enclosure sits roughly thirty metres north of an existing farmyard, a proximity that hints at long continuity of use in this particular corner of County Clare.

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Pete F
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