Enclosure, Gorteen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the deciduous woodland at Gorteen, Co. Clare, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits quietly collapsing into its own outline, its walls swallowed by dense vegetation and its interior mostly invisible to anyone who manages to reach it.
What can still be made out, where the undergrowth relents, is a drystone wall of considerable original substance, somewhere between six and nearly ten feet thick according to early measurements, now reduced in places to a low external face barely a metre high and a tumbled mass of stone beneath the brambles.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and recorded this site during the years 1914 to 1916, mapping it as the southernmost of a cluster he called the Gorteen Group of Forts and labelling it a cathair, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort. A cathair, broadly speaking, is an enclosed settlement defined by a substantial stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one measured ninety-eight feet across its interior, or garth. Westropp noted that it was connected to a neighbouring enclosure to the north by a stone causeway running from the middle of that enclosure's southern fosse, a fosse being the external ditch that typically accompanied such structures. At the time of his visit the wall was, he wrote, "perfect round the craggy platform to the north-east," built of rather poor coursed dry-stone masonry and standing four to five feet high. He also recorded the traces of late cabins within the interior, by then nearly effaced, suggesting the enclosure had seen some form of post-medieval domestic use long after its original purpose had passed. By the time of more recent survey work, the wall was visible only in fragments to the south-east and north-north-west, and a limekiln recorded on the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map to the south-south-east had itself become nothing more than a depression in the ground.