Enclosure, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

On a bare limestone terrace in Ballynahown, County Clare, a low curved wall traces most of a circle that was never quite finished, or at least never quite closed.

The enclosure is C-shaped, open to the east, roughly 35 metres across from north to south, and built from drystone, a technique requiring no mortar, relying instead on the careful fitting of stone against stone. The wall itself is modest in height, around half a metre on both its interior and exterior faces, and roughly 65 centimetres thick. What makes the site quietly arresting is not its scale but its incompleteness: the open eastern side gives it the quality of something arrested mid-gesture.

The enclosure sits within a much larger and older field system on the same terrace, suggesting that this was once a managed and productive landscape, even if its precise date and purpose remain unclear. Immediately to the east, a second enclosure, slightly larger, shares the same general arrangement. The two are separated by a field wall running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, and that wall appears to be a later addition, implying that the two enclosures may once have formed part of a single coherent layout before the dividing wall was inserted. The drystone boundary is best preserved along the western and north-western arc, where it retains much of its original form. The limestone pavement beneath and around it is largely exposed, which is typical of this part of the Burren, where thin or absent soils leave the underlying rock near the surface and give the whole landscape its distinctive spare, grey character.

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Pete F
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