Enclosure, Gorteen, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Gorteen, Co. Clare

In the mixed woodland and limestone outcrop of Gorteen, in County Clare, a circular enclosure sits with no obvious entrance, its collapsed drystone wall so thoroughly consumed by moss that the stones have lost almost all their edges.

The wall, roughly four metres wide at its base and still standing to about half a metre on the exterior, forms a near-perfect ring some nineteen metres across. Whatever gap once allowed people in and out has long since vanished, leaving a structure that reads less as a ruin than as a deliberate enigma.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1914 and 1916, described it as a late ring enclosure containing a circular house-site within its garth, the garth being the enclosed yard or interior ground. That interior is now heavily wooded with beech trees, and the ground beneath them is scattered with loose, moss-covered stones that make the surface uneven underfoot. A concentration of stones slightly off-centre to the west may represent the remnant of that internal structure Westropp noted, though it is buried beneath a thicket of smaller trees and dead branches, making any clear assessment impossible. The enclosure appears on Ordnance Survey historic mapping as a circular feature that once incorporated a field boundary running northwest to northeast, and the physical evidence bears this out in an unexpected way: a later drystone wall, built from more angular stone and using a noticeably different construction technique, was laid directly on top of the enclosing bank along its northern arc. Whoever built that field wall was either unaware of, or entirely indifferent to, what lay beneath it.

The layering of the two walls is perhaps the most legible part of the site today, the contrast in stonework making the sequence of construction readable even to a casual eye. The rounded, mossy boulders of the original enclosure and the sharper, more workmanlike stone of the later field wall tell two different stories about how this patch of Clare ground was used, though the distance in time between those two stories remains, for now, unclear.

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