Enclosure, Garruragh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In a field of improved pasture just north of the road between Ennis and Scarriff, a low oval earthwork sits so quietly in the landscape that it went unrecorded until someone spotted it on a satellite image in 2017.
That is not unusual for sites of this kind; centuries of agricultural improvement have reduced many such enclosures to little more than a faint suggestion in the ground, legible from above in a way they seldom are at eye level. What makes this one worth pausing over is precisely that near-invisibility, and the questions it raises without quite answering them.
The enclosure at Garruragh is oval in plan, measuring roughly 22 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 29 metres on the northwest to southeast axis. It is defined by a low earthen bank, barely 30 centimetres high on the outer face and slightly less on the inner, with an overall width of just over six metres. An enclosure of this type, a roughly circular or oval area bounded by a bank and sometimes a ditch, is a form found widely across Ireland and associated with a broad range of uses and periods, from early medieval farmsteads to stock enclosures of much later date. Three gaps interrupt the bank at the northwest, north, and southeast, and at least one of these is likely to represent the original entrance, though which one is not certain. The interior is gently dish-shaped, sloping down towards the northwest in keeping with the natural lie of the ground. A mature tree stands about 25 metres to the north, the kind of solitary landmark that often survives alongside older earthworks in pastoral landscapes.