Enclosure, Carrowdotia, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowdotia, Co. Clare

Something about this low-lying corner of County Clare resists easy explanation.

A roughly D-shaped patch of ground, grass-covered and edged with rock outcrop and scrub, sits defined by a scarp no more than half a metre high. That modest earthwork is all that visibly remains of what was once, apparently, a circular enclosure measuring around thirty metres in diameter.

The 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it with hachures, the small lines cartographers used to indicate an earthwork boundary, suggesting the feature was already a relic by the time the surveyors passed through. Between that mid-nineteenth-century record and the present, the enclosure has lost some of its original form: a field wall running northwest to southeast cuts across the northeastern side, truncating the scarp and collapsing whatever symmetry the original circuit once had. What survives is closer to twenty metres across rather than the thirty metres the earlier map implies, and its shape has shifted from circular to something more angular and partial. Enclosures of this kind in Ireland were built for a variety of purposes across many centuries, from early medieval ringforts used as farmstead enclosures to prehistoric settlement sites, though nothing in what is currently known about this particular example pins it to a specific period or function.

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