Enclosure, Derreen, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Derreen, Co. Clare

A roughly circular earthwork in the townland of Derreen has been quietly sitting in the Clare landscape for centuries, its outline first captured by the Ordnance Survey in 1840 and still legible today beneath a modern field wall.

The enclosure measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, which places it within the range typically associated with early medieval ringforts, the type of enclosed farmstead that once formed the basic unit of rural settlement across Ireland. A ringfort, to put it plainly, is a circular area of ground defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built to protect a household and its livestock rather than to serve any military purpose in the conventional sense.

The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the enclosure using hachures, the short lines used by cartographers of that period to suggest the slope of a bank or earthwork. By the time the 1940 edition was drawn, it appears as a curving solid line, suggesting the earthwork had been partially absorbed into the working agricultural landscape around it. Aerial imagery from between 2011 and 2013 confirms that the bank still survives, with a modern wall laid directly on top of it, and hints at a possible annexe, a secondary enclosure attached at the north-east. This is not an isolated feature. The site sits within a broader system of fields that may be broadly contemporary with the enclosure itself, and several similar enclosures exist in the surrounding area, pointing to a landscape that was once fairly densely settled and organised in ways that only archaeology can now recover.

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Pete F
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