Enclosure, Ballyhomulta, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyhomulta, Co. Clare

Some archaeological sites are remarkable for what survives.

This one in Ballyhomulta, County Clare, is remarkable for what does not. A circular enclosure roughly 25 to 30 metres in diameter was identified from a high-altitude Geological Survey aerial photograph, clear enough in the cropmarks and shadows of an overhead image to be formally listed in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. When someone finally walked the ground in 1997, there was nothing to see. The field had been reclaimed, and the enclosure had vanished entirely from the surface.

The site sits within a remarkably dense prehistoric landscape on the Burren fringe. A cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typically built during the early medieval period, lies roughly 100 metres to the south-southwest, and another stands about 133 metres to the west. The whole area belongs to a large prehistoric field system, and approximately 575 metres to the east lies Caherballykinvarga, one of the more substantial cashels in County Clare, known for the concentric stone walls that once enclosed it. The Ballyhomulta enclosure, whatever its original function or date, would have sat comfortably within this working landscape of enclosures, boundaries, and habitation. The aerial photograph that recorded it, reference GSIAP R151/2, now constitutes the only real evidence that anything was ever there at all. The site serves as a quiet reminder that agricultural improvement, specifically the levelling and drainage that transforms rough ground into productive farmland, can erase in a single season what centuries of weather left untouched.

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