Enclosure, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

At the southern edge of a limestone pavement in Ballyganner, County Clare, there sits a low ring of collapsed stone that spent years officially misidentified.

When the Record of Monuments and Places catalogued it in 1996, it was listed as a possible barrow, the term used for a burial mound, suggesting that someone looking at the landscape from a distance saw a shape that read as funerary. That classification turned out to be wrong, though the site itself is no less interesting for it.

When the site was physically inspected in 1997, what emerged was not a burial mound but an enclosure, roughly subcircular to subrectangular in plan, measuring approximately 17 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west. Its boundary is formed by drystone walling, the dry-laid fieldstone construction common across the west of Ireland, that has since collapsed into low, spread rubble. Enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish countryside, used variously for settlement, agriculture, or the penning of animals, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which purpose any particular example served. The site had appeared on an annotated map as early as 1994, passed along through a personal communication, which hints at a small, informal thread of local knowledge running alongside the formal record. Its setting at the foot of a sloping limestone pavement, the kind of flat, fissured karst terrain so characteristic of the Burren region, would have made it a practical place to build; the stone was already there, lying in broad sheets at the surface.

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Pete F
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