Enclosure, Kiltaan, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kiltaan, Co. Clare

On a plateau of rough pasture in County Clare, a low ring of rounded stones sits at the eastern edge of what appears to be a doline, a natural hollow in the ground formed by the gradual collapse or dissolution of limestone beneath the surface.

The hollow measures roughly forty metres across, and the enclosure perches at its rim, a quiet coincidence of human construction and geological accident that gives the site an oddly deliberate quality, as if whoever built it had chosen this slightly precarious edge with some purpose in mind.

The enclosure itself is subcircular, measuring about twelve metres east to west and just under twelve metres north to south, defined by a low spread of grass-covered stone no more than seventy centimetres high at its tallest point. The stones are notably uniform, roughly spheroid and around twenty to twenty-five centimetres in diameter, which gives the structure a particular character distinct from the more improvised fieldstone walls common elsewhere in Clare. When Thomas Coffey first recorded the site, it was classified in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 as a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a spread of heat-shattered stone and often associated with a nearby water source or pit. The classification sits a little uneasily here, given the enclosing wall and the absence of the usual burnt mound material, and the structure may represent something rather different. From the north-eastern side of the enclosure, a grass-covered field wall runs eastward for about ten metres before turning south, suggesting the site was at some point incorporated into a broader pattern of land management. Two further enclosures lie within fifty to eighty metres to the south-east, all contained within a larger enclosing feature, and a cairn sits roughly eighty-nine metres to the north-west just outside it. The cluster hints at a landscape that was, at some point, more organised and more occupied than its present rough-pasture quiet suggests.

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Pete F
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