Enclosure, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

Just outside the southern wall of an early Irish cashel in Ballynahown, County Clare, there is a small enclosure that does not quite fit the pattern of the main site.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, typically circular, used as a farmstead or defended homestead in early medieval Ireland. This enclosure, measuring roughly twenty metres east to west and nine metres north to south, sits pressed against the cashel's perimeter rather than forming part of it, as though added by someone who needed more space but was unwilling, or unable, to rebuild what already stood.

The enclosure is defined by a stone wall and divided internally by a secondary north to south wall. Against the western side of that internal wall lies what may once have been a hut site, a small structure whose outline survives in the stonework. The arrangement suggests a practical addition to the cashel complex, perhaps a penning area for animals, a work space, or a shelter for people who lived alongside the main enclosure rather than within it. The site was already present when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map of 1915, though the underlying archaeology is almost certainly much older. What the 1915 map preserves is the fact of its survival, not its origin.

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Pete F
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