Enclosure, Creevagh, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Creevagh, Co. Clare

In the hazel scrub of Creevagh, in County Clare, a curved stone wall disappears into moss and vegetation, leaving those who find it uncertain whether they are looking at a burial mound or an enclosure, or perhaps something that is both.

That ambiguity is not a failure of investigation; it is the current state of knowledge, and the structure has so far resisted a fuller reading.

The site sits on level ground in a semi-karst landscape, the kind of terrain common to Clare's limestone country, where the bedrock lies close to the surface and vegetation grows dense in the cracks and hollows between outcrops. It was already marked on the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, meaning it was considered notable enough to record over a century ago, though what exactly was understood about it at that point is unclear. Tom Coffey identified it formally in 1994, describing it cautiously as either a small burial mound or an enclosure. An inspection in 1999 found the site too overgrown to be described in any systematic way, though what could be seen was suggestive: a short curved section of moss-covered walling to the south, roughly a metre wide and a metre high on the interior face, slightly lower on the exterior, and intermittent traces of what may be an outer wall-face running along the western to eastern perimeter, standing between 0.3 and 0.5 metres. The curvature of the wall points toward some kind of circular or oval structure, whether a ringfort, a cashel (a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval date), or something older connected with burial.

The dense hazel scrub that defeated the 1999 inspection has not obviously thinned in the years since, and the site remains one of those places that is recorded rather than understood, present on maps but largely unread.

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Pete F
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