Enclosure, Ballyline, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In Carthy's Wood in County Clare, there is a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres in diameter that exists, for all practical purposes, only on paper.
Quarrying activity and scrub vegetation have erased whatever physical presence it once had, and today there is nothing to see at ground level. The site survives not as a structure but as a cartographic ghost.
The enclosure was recorded using hachures, the short radiating lines that nineteenth-century mapmakers used to indicate earthworks and raised features, on the 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. That survey, conducted with considerable care across the whole of Ireland in the decades following 1824, captured countless field monuments that were already ancient at the time of surveying, and in many cases the maps are now the only surviving evidence that such features ever existed. Circular enclosures of this general type were common across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, most often serving as enclosed farmsteads, though without further investigation the date and function of this particular example cannot be established with any confidence. What the 1842 map preserves is the outline of something that the landscape itself no longer holds.