Enclosure, Kilcorney, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcorney, Co. Clare

A grassed-over stone wall, roughly oval in shape and measuring around 18 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west, sits on a south-facing slope in Kilcorney, Co. Clare.

On its own it might read as little more than a faint irregularity in the landscape, but its real interest lies in what surrounds it. The enclosure sits within a much larger multiperiod field system, meaning the land here preserves traces of human activity from more than one distinct era, layers of use that have quietly accumulated rather than been cleared away.

Observer Conn Herriott recorded the enclosure, identifying it from satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013 at a time when aerial and digital survey work was drawing attention to features long overlooked at ground level. Within roughly 100 metres to the south-west lie three further enclosures, and to the north-west and west, at distances of about 50 and 75 metres respectively, stand two cairns. Cairns in an Irish landscape context are typically mounds of stone associated with burial or with marking significant points in the terrain, and their proximity here to the enclosures adds weight to the sense that this slope was a focus of organised activity over a long period. The clustering of these features suggests not isolated incidents of settlement or ritual, but something more deliberate and sustained.

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Pete F
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