Enclosure, Cutteen Beg, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cutteen Beg, Co. Clare

At the corner of four fields in Cutteen Beg, where a townland boundary cuts across the land, a low hillock holds an enclosure that has been quietly disappearing into itself for some time.

Thorn trees and scrub vegetation have colonised the interior so completely that the monument cannot be entered or properly examined. What survives, where it can be read at all, is a roughly subcircular earthwork measuring approximately 37 metres northwest to southeast and 31 metres northeast to southwest, its profile low and worn, particularly along the northern and western sides.

The enclosure first appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it is hachured as a circular embanked area, the hachures indicating an outward-facing bank around a raised interior. By the time the later 25-inch map was produced, the same feature was being read differently, depicted instead as a sunken area, suggesting that what had once been understood as a bank was now registering as a hollow. This shift between the two surveys may reflect genuine change on the ground, or simply a difference in interpretation. Either way, it captures something of the difficulty this kind of earthwork presents: without excavation, and without even basic surface access, the function and date of the enclosure remain unresolved. A farm road skirting the southwestern exterior has further complicated matters, appearing on OS mapping to truncate the northwestern sector of the monument. Along the western edge, a low uneven embankment, roughly 1.8 metres wide and half a metre high, now partially encloses the area where the road cuts through, though whether this is a remnant of the original earthwork or a more recent field boundary is not possible to determine from the surface.

The monument sits above lower ground that opens out to the northeast, south, and northwest, a position that would have given any original occupants a clear outlook across the surrounding terrain. For now, the scrub and thorn thickets hold the interior entirely to themselves.

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Pete F
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