Enclosure, Kilcorney, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcorney, Co. Clare

At the northern edge of a plateau in Kilcorney, Co. Clare, a drystone wall curves around a roughly rectangular patch of ground with land dropping away sharply on three sides, falling into ravines to the east, west, and north.

The enclosure sits on a promontory almost entirely surrounded by steep descents, which gives it a quietly defensive quality, even if its original purpose remains uncertain. What makes the situation stranger still is the layering of time visible within a single, compact space: ancient stonework, a subterranean passage, and a later addition that the Ordnance Survey cartographers of 1897 simply labelled a sheepfold.

The enclosure is subrectangular, measuring roughly thirty to forty metres on its longer axis, and is defined by a drystone wall about half a metre wide and standing between 1.1 and 1.5 metres high in its better-preserved sections. The wall is sturdiest along the west, where a footing of horizontally laid stones underlies the construction, and most reduced along the south, where it has worn down to around 0.6 metres. Inside, a band of grass-covered collapsed stone runs along the interior face, suggesting a wall once considerably more substantial. The most intriguing feature is the souterrain in the north-west of the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of adjacent structures. Built into the north-east corner of the enclosure is a separate drystone cell, roughly five and a half metres by four metres, which, by the time the 1897 Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch plan was drawn, had been pressed into agricultural use as a sheepfold. The enclosure itself appears on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, and sits within a broader multiperiod field system, suggesting that the landscape around it was being organised and reorganised across many centuries.

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Pete F
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