Enclosure, Ballyconry, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyconry, Co. Clare

In the middle of the Carran Depression in County Clare, a modest oval earthwork sits at the south-western tip of a low rise of ground, surrounded on most sides by land that floods regularly.

The enclosure itself is easy to miss: a low earthen bank traces an oval roughly fifty metres across, barely announcing itself above the surrounding terrain. What makes it quietly remarkable is the position chosen for it, a slight promontory just prominent enough to stay dry when the depression around it fills with water.

The Carran Depression is a turlough landscape, a karst environment where water rises and drains through the limestone beneath rather than flowing off the surface in the conventional way. Whoever built this enclosure understood the ground well enough to site it precisely where it would remain usable. The earthwork appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1840 and 1916, which confirms it was a known feature of the landscape across that period, though its age is not recorded. A second enclosure of similar character lies roughly ninety-five metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of the depression was once a more deliberately organised piece of land than it appears today.

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Pete F
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