Enclosure, Ballycotteen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On a hilltop in Ballycotteen, County Clare, a low ring of stone and earth sits quietly in pasture, known locally as the site of a fort but resisting any tidy classification.
The enclosure measures roughly 25 metres across, its defining banks only 20 centimetres high and three to four metres wide in places, some curving into a rough C shape rather than completing a full circuit. The interior dips slightly at the centre, and along the southern and western edges, low piles of field clearance rubble have accumulated over the years, the result of generations of farming rather than any deliberate monument-making.
The site appeared on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as far back as 1840, marked with hachures, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, and it appeared again on the 1916 revision. That persistence in the cartographic record suggests it was already recognised as something worth noting, even if its precise origins remain unclear. Whether it began as a small ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, or served some other agricultural or boundary function, the evidence on the ground is too worn to say with certainty. What survives is the outline: a gentle, interrupted arc of bank, a shallow interior, and a commanding view southward across the Clare landscape.