Enclosure, Carran, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carran, Co. Clare

A small rectangular enclosure of collapsed drystone wall sitting on a limestone plateau near Carran in County Clare is, on the surface, an unremarkable thing.

What makes it quietly interesting is the company it keeps. Within roughly twenty metres in either direction lie a possible wedge tomb, a cairn, and a further cairn just to the north of the enclosure's own entrance gap. A wedge tomb is a megalithic burial monument, typically dating from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, characterised by a tapering, wedge-shaped gallery of upright stones. That this modest, apparently recent enclosure has ended up clustered so closely with features of that antiquity gives the plateau an odd layered quality, as though different periods of human activity kept gravitating to the same patch of exposed rock and rough grazing.

The enclosure itself is not ancient. Though it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1920, surveyors have judged it to be relatively modern in origin. Being hachured on those maps, meaning indicated by short lines suggesting a raised or bounded feature, confirms it was a legible structure in the nineteenth century, but the wall that once defined it has largely given way. What remains is mostly a stone spread about three metres wide, with the original wall now standing no more than half a metre in height along its better-preserved stretches. The interior measures roughly ten metres by nine, and a narrow entrance gap near the north end of the southeast wall, marked by upright stones in a stile-like arrangement, is still discernible. A small flat cairn sits just to the north of that entrance. A hut site lies approximately forty-five metres to the northeast, adding yet another layer to what is, in the end, a surprisingly dense little pocket of the Burren landscape.

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Pete F
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