Enclosure, Carran, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carran, Co. Clare

Above Poulacarran Valley in County Clare, a D-shaped stone enclosure sits at the very rim of a north-facing cliff, with the land falling away sharply on virtually every side.

What makes it remarkable is not merely the position but the engineering logic behind it. Where a ravine drops away to the west, the builders appear to have deepened or shaped it deliberately, leaving a single level causeway of natural bedrock, roughly ten metres long and up to six and a half metres wide, as the sole convenient approach. Anyone arriving had no choice but to walk that causeway to reach the entrance, which is still marked by a large sill-stone, 1.8 metres long, set at the base of the wall. The enclosure itself is a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, and its outer wall-face, up to two metres high in places, was carefully constructed, even if much of it has since collapsed outward down the steep southern slope. A hut site survives in the centre of the interior.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and is hachured on the 1920 edition of the six-inch map, which also marks a natural cave in the cliff face immediately to the north. The cave is reached by descending from the eastern end of the causeway along a zigzagging path down the steep north-facing slope, arriving at a platform roughly eight metres below the enclosure. From there, a funnel-shaped entrance, about five metres wide at its mouth and narrowing to around three metres, leads into a low, pear-shaped chamber approximately eight metres east to west and five metres north to south, with a maximum height of only one metre. The floor holds a substantial layer of sediment, and at the western end of the chamber two passages, apparently filled with sediment, extend further into the rock and have been described as possible escape tunnels. Whether the cave was used in connection with the enclosure above it, or served some earlier or entirely separate purpose, remains an open question.

The whole complex sits within a larger multiperiod field system, suggesting this corner of the Burren was worked and inhabited across several different eras. Visitors approaching from the west along the causeway will notice how the outer wall-face, where it survives, still presents a clean and deliberate face to anyone making that approach, the entrance sill-stone legible in the masonry even after centuries of collapse elsewhere. The cave path requires care; the slope is genuinely steep and the chamber, once reached, is low enough to demand crawling.

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