Enclosure, Carrowcraheen, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowcraheen, Co. Clare

In the pasture at Carrowcraheen, a suboval enclosure sits behind a thicket of hazel scrub and gorse so dense that its interior has become effectively unreachable.

Nobody can say with confidence where its entrance once was, and a later drystone wall built against its southern face seals off the deepest part of the surrounding fosse entirely. The enclosure is not especially large, around 25 metres along its longer axis and 17 metres across, but it commands wide views from south-west around to north, which suggests that visibility, whether for surveillance or display, was once a consideration for whoever built here.

The site sits on a slight west-facing slope at the north-western end of a ridge, roughly 20 metres south-east of a stream. At its core appears to be a raised central platform or mound, standing nearly three metres high at its north-western edge where the vegetation happens to thin out. The builders incorporated existing outcropping rock into this platform rather than working entirely from scratch, a practical approach common in areas where stone sits close to the surface. Around the platform runs a fosse, the ditch-like depression that typically accompanies enclosed monuments of this kind; it is wide and flat to the north and south, shallower as it curves around to the south-west. An external bank completes the arrangement, most substantial along the eastern side, where it measures over four metres in width. The enclosure appeared on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan surveyed between 1913 and 1918, marked by hachures, the cartographic shorthand for earthwork slopes, though the earlier six-inch map of 1916 recorded only a faint trace of the same feature.

Access today is complicated not only by the vegetation but by a drystone wall that was built against the southern edge of the monument at some later point, presumably to manage livestock movement through the pasture. Part of that wall, which once ran westward to meet a field boundary, has since been removed, but the section blocking the fosse remains. Field clearance piled against the north-eastern portion of the enclosure may or may not conceal where an entrance once stood; the ground has not given up that detail yet.

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Pete F
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