Enclosure, Cragballyconoal, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
At Cragballyconoal in County Clare, a large stone enclosure sits directly against a circular cashel, the two structures pressed together as though one grew out of the other.
What makes the arrangement quietly odd is how deliberate and geometrically confident the enclosure appears alongside its rounded neighbour. Three of its walls run straight, meeting at sharply squared corners to the northwest and northeast, while the eastern wall abandons its straight line only at the southern end, curving inward to meet the cashel's circumference. The effect is almost architectural in its precision.
The enclosure is subrectangular in plan, measuring roughly 58.5 metres east to west and approximately 42 metres north to south. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval Irish origin, typically circular, and usually associated with a farmstead or small settlement. This one sits to the south, and the enclosure beside it was clearly built with it in mind, sharing a boundary rather than ignoring it. The walls of the enclosure are uncoursed, double-faced, and rubble-filled, reaching a maximum width of about 1.2 metres and a height of up to 1.5 metres. Along the eastern half of the northern wall, three well-formed sections survive, and the central section retains an upright pillar that appears to mark the eastern side of a former entrance. The interior, stripped of any soil or vegetation, is bare exposed karst, the smooth limestone pavement characteristic of the Burren landscape. A modern wall, built at some later and unrecorded point, runs north to south through the western half of the enclosure and carries on across the middle of the cashel itself, cutting through both structures without ceremony. Tim Bowmer, who documented and reported the site, photographed the walls, the entrance feature, and the open limestone floor from multiple angles, giving a clear sense of how much of the original stonework survives in readable condition.