Enclosure, Gorteen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
There is a small field in Gorteen, County Clare, where an ancient enclosure has effectively ceased to exist twice: once when the land was improved during the 1960s and 70s, and once, more quietly, when it failed to appear on any of the Ordnance Survey's historic maps.
What remains is little more than a memory of stones, invisible at ground level, lying beneath improved pasture on a gently east-facing slope where rock outcrops push close to the surface.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in the years between 1914 and 1916, placing it on a map he titled the 'Gorteen Group of Forts' and labelling it simply 'C'. His description is spare but telling: a ring of small blocks, he wrote, nearly levelled, with only the wall of enclosure C retaining any filling. Westropp was a meticulous documenter of Clare's field monuments, and his note suggests the site was already far advanced in its decay by the early twentieth century. The enclosure belongs to a broader class of roughly circular stone structures found across Ireland, typically interpreted as early medieval farmsteads or settlement boundaries, though the specifics of Gorteen's example remain difficult to assess given how little survives. A beech woodland with visible rock outcroppings and scattered stone deposits lies immediately to the north, hinting at the kind of thin-soiled, limestone-fractured landscape that characterises much of this part of Clare.