Enclosure, Ballyfaudeen, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyfaudeen, Co. Clare

In the marshy pasture of Ballyfaudeen, a low ridge holds the remains of an enclosure that the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey mapmakers never recorded.

It escaped their attention entirely, and for a long time existed only as a quiet irregularity in the land, unacknowledged on any official map until aerial photography in the early 2000s made its outline unmistakable from above.

What survives is a subcircular enclosure, roughly 60 metres across at its widest point, built around a scarped platform, that is, a levelled area of ground cut and shaped from the natural slope, approximately 35 metres in diameter. Around the outside of this platform runs a shallow fosse, a type of encircling ditch, now only about ten centimetres deep and a metre and a half wide, its presence betrayed mainly by a band of darker vegetation rather than any obvious earthwork. A low rise along the eastern edge may be the remnant of an internal earthen bank, and traces of the same bank persist on the northern side of a boreen, the small country road that clips and truncates the enclosure to the north. A more recent field bank cuts across the southern half, and a house built around 2005 now occupies the western side of the site, leaving the interior flat and largely featureless at ground level.

The enclosure belongs to a broad class of earthwork found widely across Ireland, typically associated with early medieval settlement and land use, though without excavation it is impossible to say precisely what this particular example was for or when it was built. What makes it quietly notable is the combination of factors working against its survival and recognition: the boggy ground, the missing map record, the boreen cutting through it, the modern house planted across one edge. That anything coherent remains to read in the landscape at all is itself something worth pausing over.

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Pete F
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