Enclosure, Garruragh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
At the top of a low hillock in County Clare, a near-perfect circle of earth sits quietly in improved pasture, its raised interior still holding its shape after what may be well over a thousand years.
The monument at Garruragh measures nineteen metres across in both directions, a symmetry that is hard to account for by accident. Its enclosing bank, broad and substantial, reaches an external height of up to 1.6 metres on its north-eastern side, though on the opposite face it has been worn or cut back to a short, sharp scarp barely two metres wide. Thorn and ash trees have colonised the top of the bank, their roots helping, paradoxically, both to hold the structure together and to disturb it.
This type of monument, a roughly circular earthen enclosure defined by a raised bank, is broadly understood to belong to the early medieval period in Ireland, though many examples remain undated without excavation. They are sometimes described as ringforts, a general term covering a wide variety of enclosed settlements that served as farmsteads, high-status residences, or places of security for livestock. The interior here sits about 0.75 metres above the surrounding ground level, which is a common feature, giving the enclosed space a slight elevation above the exterior. Notably, there is no obvious outer fosse, the term for a defensive ditch that typically accompanies such enclosures. A section on the south-south-east side has been lowered by approximately 0.2 metres at some point in relatively modern times, a small but telling sign of the quiet attrition that agricultural improvement has worked on monuments like this across rural Ireland.
The enclosure sits in the western corner of its field, with a trackway running along the north-western edge. The bank is broad enough at its crown, around 2.8 metres, to walk along in places, and the gentle views across the undulating landscape from its slight elevation give some sense of why this particular hillock was chosen in the first place.