Enclosure, Cappagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cappagh, Co. Clare

In the pastureland of Cappagh, Co. Clare, there is a large enclosure roughly 50 metres across that you cannot see.

No earthwork rises above the grass, no ditch catches the eye, no ring of stones interrupts the field. The site exists, in any practical sense, only on paper.

The 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps recorded it clearly, marked with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate raised or defined boundaries, suggesting that at the time of the first survey the enclosure was sufficiently legible to be mapped with some confidence. By the 1915 edition, it had disappeared from the record entirely. Whether it was levelled deliberately, eroded gradually, or simply overtaken by centuries of agricultural activity is not known. What remains is a ghost of a boundary, plotted once and then quietly dropped, sitting on level ground at the western foot of a low north-to-south ridge. The absence of any surface trace today means it survives, if it survives at all, as a subsurface feature, the kind of site that only aerial photography, LiDAR survey, or excavation is likely to recover in any detail.

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Pete F
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