Enclosure, Cutteen More, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cutteen More, Co. Clare

On a gently undulating field in Cutteen More, Co. Clare, there is an ancient enclosure that no longer exists above ground.

It survives only on paper, captured in the detail of the 25-inch Ordnance Survey map as an oval earthwork measuring roughly 33 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. That map also shows a footpath skirting its western side, a small human habit worn into the landscape around something that was already, presumably, a low and unremarkable feature. Today, standing on the level plateau where it once sat, with bedrock close beneath the surface, there is nothing to see at all.

According to local information, the enclosure was levelled during land improvement works in the 1970s, a decade when agricultural modernisation across Ireland reshaped enormous areas of older landscape, often erasing earthworks that had survived for centuries or millennia. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval in form and typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, are among the most common monument types in the Irish countryside. They served various purposes depending on their period and character, from settlement enclosures to stock enclosures to burial or ritual sites. Without the earthwork itself remaining, it is difficult to say which category this one belonged to. What is clear is that it sat between three field boundaries, to the south-west, north-west, and north-east, suggesting it had been absorbed into the working agricultural landscape long before it was finally removed entirely.

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Pete F
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