Enclosure, Derrymore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the boggy ground of Derrymore, Co. Clare, cattle stand around a round feeder in the mud, entirely unaware that they are wintering inside what was once a defined prehistoric or early medieval enclosure.
The interior of the site is now a churned, waterlogged paddock, the kind of unremarkable farmyard corner that draws no second glance. Yet beneath the hooves and the mire, the faint geometry of an ancient boundary persists.
The enclosure was noted as long ago as 1908 or 1909, when the antiquarian T. J. Westropp recorded it simply as a 'levelled earthwork', a label that tells its own story about the site's condition even then. The 25-inch Ordnance Survey map depicts an oval roughly 35 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, defined by a single enclosing bank. An enclosure of this type, a roughly circular or oval area bounded by an earthen bank, is a form found widely across Ireland, often associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural use, though the type alone rarely settles questions of date or purpose. What survives at Derrymore is a partial arc of that bank, running for approximately 37 metres from the west-northwest to the east-northeast. It is low and heavily denuded, rising only about 35 centimetres on its outer face and a mere 15 centimetres internally, with an overall width of just under four metres. The rest of the circuit has been levelled or cut through: a farm driveline bisects one section, a haggard, the yard area traditionally used for stacking hay or grain, has truncated another, and further stretches have simply been flattened over time. A small pond sits just to the north-northeast, and a second enclosure lies approximately 107 metres to the east-southeast, hinting that this corner of Derrymore was once a more structured landscape than its current appearance suggests.