Enclosure, Kilcorney, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcorney, Co. Clare

On a limestone plateau in the Burren, a small stone-walled enclosure sits so quietly within the surrounding field system that it is easy to read it simply as another boundary feature.

It is roughly square, measuring around thirteen metres north to south and twelve metres east to west, and its northern wall may already have been absorbed into a later field boundary, blurring the line between ancient structure and working landscape. A rough trackway passes outside it to the south, and a possible annexe or small field extends from the north-west corner, suggesting whatever use this place once served was not entirely self-contained.

The Burren is karst country, meaning the underlying limestone has been dissolved and sculpted by water over millennia, leaving a terrain of exposed rock pavements, fissures called grikes, and thin soils that nevertheless supported farming communities across many centuries. This enclosure sits within a much larger field system at Kilcorney and is not alone even on its own plateau: a similar enclosure lies roughly 163 metres to the south-east, and a further one approximately 60 metres to the east. The cluster implies organised, deliberate use of this ground rather than isolated or accidental construction. The site was noted by Conn Herriott and appears on both older Ordnance Survey Cassini mapping and on aerial imagery from 2011 to 2013, which places it within a landscape that has been observed and recorded across different periods without yet giving up a clear account of itself.

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Pete F
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