Enclosure, Glencolumbkille, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glencolumbkille, Co. Clare

In a patch of low-lying woodland in County Clare, a collapsed stone wall traces the outline of something old and not entirely explained.

The structure is subcircular, roughly 21 metres east to west and 19 metres north to south, its wall now reduced to a spread of randomly coursed rubble between 2.6 and 4.1 metres wide and just over a metre high at its tallest points. The interior is stone-strewn and slightly hollow, that shallow depression hinting at long centuries of settlement, clearance, or simply the slow subsidence of whatever once stood here. The woodland keeps the site enclosed and quiet, with limited views in any direction.

An enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular or oval area defined by a substantial stone wall, is a form found across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, though such structures can be difficult to date without excavation. What makes this one quietly interesting is its company. A tower house, the remains of Glencolumbkille Castle, stands approximately 38 metres to the south-southwest. Tower houses were the fortified residences favoured by Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords from the fourteenth century through to the seventeenth, and their surrounding enclosures, sometimes called bawns, were functional as much as defensive, used for sheltering livestock and controlling access. Whether this enclosure relates to that tower house, predates it, or served some entirely separate purpose remains an open question. About 100 metres to the south-southeast there is also a possible barrow, a burial mound, which would suggest the area carries layers of human activity reaching back considerably further. The site was recorded on Ordnance Survey mapping at both the 25-inch scale in 1897 and in the later Cassini edition of the 6-inch map from 1920, indicating it was a visible and recognised feature of the landscape well into the modern period.

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Pete F
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