Enclosure, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

One of the more quietly puzzling features of the Ballyganner landscape in County Clare is an enclosure that appears to have grown between one Ordnance Survey map and the next.

Recorded in 1842 as a roughly circular ring about 26 metres across, by 1920 the same structure had become noticeably larger and had shifted in plan to a D-shape, its interior now measuring some 33.8 metres across its longest axis. Whether the ground changed, or the surveyors were looking at something that was still being built and altered, is not entirely clear.

The enclosure sits at the western edge of a northeast-to-southwest ridge, in rough pasture that falls steeply away to the northwest. It is defined by a drystone wall, the kind built without mortar, ranging from half a metre to two metres in height. Most of its sides run in straight sections, with only the southern stretch curving, and that curve may simply be a remnant of whatever the earlier, circular structure looked like. Large flat stones, about a metre long and 20 centimetres high, are set into the wall with their long axis pointing inward, creating a flush outer face. The detail that most complicates any attempt to read this as an ancient monument is the manner of its construction: the wall sits directly on topsoil, and there is almost no rubble scatter from collapse, both of which suggest it is comparatively recent rather than medieval or earlier. A smaller rectangular enclosure lies about 20 metres to the northeast, built in a similar style, and is likewise considered not to be an antiquity. What gives the site its real interest is its neighbourhood: two cashels, the term for a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval date, lie to the south and southwest, one only about 20 metres away. The enclosure at the centre of the site sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it carries traces of human organisation from several different eras layered one over another. The newer structure, whatever its precise purpose, was built into a place that had already been shaped and reshaped across centuries.

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