Enclosure, Ballyhomulta, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In a stretch of rough pasture in County Clare, a roughly circular arrangement of stone walls sits quietly in low, undulating ground, its outline softened by centuries of grass growing over the stonework.
The enclosure measures around eighteen metres in diameter, modest in scale but telling in its placement within a much larger field system that accumulated across several different periods of use. What makes the site quietly interesting is not any single dramatic feature but the layering implied by its surroundings: walls from different eras overlapping, abutting, and running alongside one another in a landscape that was clearly worked and reworked over a long stretch of time.
A field wall running from the south-west connects this enclosure to a cashel just fourteen metres away. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, and the proximity of the two structures, joined by a shared contemporary wall, suggests they functioned as part of the same agricultural or settlement complex. The enclosure was brought to the attention of the National Monuments Service by Conn Herriott, and its presence was confirmed through satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013. It sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the boundaries and divisions of this landscape were not laid down in one go but built up gradually, each generation of farmers inheriting and adapting what came before.