Enclosure, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

Sometimes the most telling thing about an ancient site is its absence.

At Ballyganner in County Clare, a roughly rectangular clearing among hazel scrub and exposed limestone pavement marks a place where something once stood, though what exactly remains a matter of careful qualification. The ground is level, the bedrock juts through in places, and around the edges of the clearing lie piles of broken stone, the only physical remnant of whatever was here before the land was cleared.

The site appears on both the 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan and the 1920 edition of the 6-inch map, depicted as a subrectangular field measuring roughly 24 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and about 19 metres north to south, with a field wall running off its western side. Its representation on those maps closely resembles that of a cashel recorded roughly 235 metres to its east-northeast. A cashel is a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, typically circular or oval, used to define a farmstead or settlement. The similarity in depiction raises the possibility that this Ballyganner feature was something of the same character, though the cartographic evidence alone is not enough to say so with confidence. By the time Tim Robinson surveyed the area in 1977, the site had already been cleared and nothing structural remained above ground.

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