Enclosure, Fanygalvan, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Fanygalvan, Co. Clare

Sitting in a slight hollow on high rough pasture somewhere between the 400 and 500 foot contours in County Clare, this subcircular enclosure at Fanygalvan is the kind of site that rewards careful attention rather than dramatic first impressions.

It has limited visibility from the surrounding landscape, which may well have been intentional, and its interior is slightly concave, giving it a quietly sunken quality that sets it apart from the ground around it. Just outside its eastern edge sits a small stone structure, most likely a livestock pen, a detail that hints at the practical working life this place once supported.

The enclosure measures roughly 23 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, and is defined by a stony bank between two and three metres wide, rising to a maximum height of about 0.7 metres. A later wall has been built directly on top of this bank, which is itself a telling detail: the structure has been reused and added to across different periods rather than simply abandoned. The site sits within a much broader, multi-period field system, meaning it forms just one element of a layered agricultural landscape that was shaped and reshaped over a very long span of time. Between the south-south-east and south-west, the enclosing wall appears to overlie the north-eastern edge of a separate, adjoining enclosure to the south-west, suggesting the two features were built at different times and that the later one encroached on the earlier. The site appeared on the Cassini edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1920, though the underlying archaeology is considerably older than that cartographic record.

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Pete F
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