Enclosure, Commons, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Commons, Co. Clare

Between 400 and 500 feet above sea level on the rough pasture of Commons in County Clare, a square of low, grass-covered wall sits quietly within a landscape that has been shaped and reshaped by human hands across several different periods.

The enclosure is modest in scale, roughly 12 metres on each side, and it was identified not by a ground survey but through aerial imagery captured between 2013 and 2018. That is a telling detail in itself: some features of the Irish countryside are now easier to read from above than from within them.

The enclosure sits within what appears to be an extensive multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape preserves traces of agricultural organisation from more than one era, boundaries and divisions accumulated over centuries rather than laid out at a single moment. About 50 metres to the north-east lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure of early medieval origin typically associated with a farmstead or small settlement, which suggests that this part of Clare was once more densely occupied and organised than its present appearance of open rough grazing might imply. Whether the square enclosure and the cashel are contemporary with one another or separated by generations is not currently known, but their proximity on this elevated ground hints at a longer story of land use that has yet to be fully read.

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Pete F
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