Enclosure, Ballydonohoe, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballydonohoe, Co. Clare

On a hilltop in reclaimed pastureland in County Clare, there is a levelled grassy platform that has been quietly sitting in plain sight since at least 1842, when Ordnance Survey cartographers thought it worth marking on their six-inch map.

It appears again on the 1920 edition, suggesting it was still recognisable across nearly a century of agricultural change. What it actually was, nobody can say with certainty. It reads as an enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or sub-rectangular defined space that appears across Ireland in various forms, from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric gathering places, but the evidence here is fragmentary enough to resist confident interpretation.

The platform itself measures roughly 27 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south, defined not by an upstanding wall but by a scarp, a low step in the ground, running between about 25 and 45 centimetres high. Along the east and south-east side, a faint earthen mound hints at what may have been an enclosing bank, though it survives now only as a subtle thickening of the ground, about two metres wide and barely ten centimetres above the surrounding surface. At the north-west, a short run of limestone uprights, stretching roughly four metres along the scarp edge, could be the remnant of a stone-lined bank, or equally could be rubble cleared from nearby fields over the years. To the south, a D-shaped platform extends off the main enclosure, measuring around ten metres by nine. Whether this is an original feature associated with the enclosure, something shaped by natural processes, or the result of more recent field clearance, remains an open question. The site commands wide views in all directions, which in itself is a detail that tends to recur with purpose-built enclosures, though it proves nothing.

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Pete F
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