Enclosure, Carrowcraheen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
At Carrowcraheen in County Clare, a circular enclosure roughly 45 metres across has spent generations quietly disappearing into the pasture.
It is almost entirely gone now, levelled so thoroughly that only a faint arc of its original bank, estimated at around 4.5 metres wide, can be picked out at all, and then only in satellite imagery captured between 2013 and 2018. That the site exists at all is less a matter of standing archaeology than of careful reading across different kinds of evidence.
What gives the site its particular interest is its cartographic history. It was recorded with hachuring, the small lines surveyors used to indicate banks and earthworks, on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1842, and again on the later Cassini edition of 1916. That span of nearly eighty years suggests the enclosure was at least partially legible on the ground through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, even if agricultural pressure was steadily reducing it. Circular enclosures of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though without excavation the date and function of any individual example remain open questions. Adding to the picture, a second levelled enclosure sits approximately eight metres to the south-east, suggesting that whatever activity once took place here was not confined to a single structure.