Enclosure, Ballymurphy, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymurphy, Co. Clare

On the Burren plateau above Ballymurphy in County Clare, aerial photography has picked out the ghost of an enclosure that nobody can quite place.

Visible on imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, it appears as a roughly subrectangular outline, approximately 20 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, sitting in open rough pasture. A trackway cuts across it from west to east, suggesting the ground here has been crossed and used repeatedly over a long stretch of time, even if the purposes behind each use have long since blurred together.

What makes the site quietly compelling is the landscape it occupies. The Burren is one of the most densely layered archaeological environments in Ireland, where the bare limestone surface has preserved field boundaries, enclosures, and monuments from multiple periods lying almost on top of one another. This enclosure sits within exactly that kind of multiperiod field system, meaning the walls, banks, and boundaries around it do not all belong to the same era or the same people. Enclosures of this general form could date to almost any period from the prehistoric through to the early medieval, and without excavation it is impossible to say more than that this one existed, that someone enclosed a roughly rectangular patch of ground here, and that others later walked a track through or beside it. The site was noted by Conn Herriott.

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Pete F
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