Enclosure, Derrynavahagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On the western shoulder of a ridge in County Clare, a rough ring of loose stone sits so thoroughly overgrown that it barely announces itself against the rocky grazing land around it.
What it describes, once you work out its shape, is a subcircular enclosure roughly 44 metres across, its defining spread of stone now about two metres wide and softened by generations of vegetation. Enclosures of this kind, broadly circular or oval boundaries built from stone or earth, appear across Ireland in considerable numbers and served a range of purposes over the centuries, from farmstead boundaries to stock enclosures, though the precise function of any individual example is rarely easy to pin down.
The site sits within a much larger field system extending across several townlands, from Formoyle in the north, through Faunarooska, and down to Lislarheen Beg in the south. That broader landscape of ancient land division gives some sense of how organised and worked this terrain once was, even if it now presents as little more than rough grazing. One small detail in the administrative geography points to the enclosure's age or at least its long-standing presence in the landscape: the townland boundary between Lisharheenmore and Derrynavahagh bends noticeably at the southern end of the enclosure, curving around it rather than cutting straight through. Boundaries of that kind tend to respect features that were already old and established when the lines were drawn. The enclosure was recorded on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though its origins almost certainly reach back considerably further than that mid-twentieth-century documentation.