Enclosure, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

At Cahermackirilla in County Clare, a rectangular enclosure sits quietly at the foot of a south-facing slope, embedded within an older field system.

What makes it mildly puzzling is the gap between expectation and reality: listed under the category of 'Enclosure' in official records from the early 1990s, it carries the kind of designation that often signals something ancient, yet closer inspection tells a different story.

When the site was examined in 1998, the structure turned out to be of modern construction, a detail that complicates its earlier listings. The enclosure measures roughly 35 metres east to west and 26 metres north to south internally. Its north and east sides are formed by a double-faced drystone wall, a construction method in which two parallel rows of stone are laid with the faces outward, giving the wall both stability and a relatively neat appearance. These walls stand about 1.5 metres high and reach a metre in width. The south and west sides, by contrast, are defined by simpler, rougher drystone work, suggesting either a different phase of construction or a more utilitarian approach on those sides. A single entrance opens on the east. The enclosure first appeared on a first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map annotated by Thomas Johnson Westropp, the Clare-born antiquarian who spent much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries documenting the monuments of Munster, which explains how a relatively ordinary agricultural enclosure ended up attached to his name and, eventually, to a heritage listing.

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Pete F
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