Enclosure, Knockauns Mountain, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockauns Mountain, Co. Clare

High on the north-eastern slopes of Knockauns Mountain in County Clare, somewhere between the 700-foot and 800-foot contours, sits a small drystone enclosure that has quietly resisted easy classification for well over a century.

It measures roughly 13 metres north to south and 11 metres east to west, making it a modest thing by any measure, yet its position within a large upland field system, and its proximity to two cashels, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, suggests it was once part of a more deliberate and possibly complex arrangement of structures on the hillside.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted it twice, in 1901 and again in 1915, grouping it among what he called "late folds" and, more evocatively, a "curious group of ring walls." Westropp's hesitation to commit to a single function is telling. The enclosure appears on both the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 and the later Cassini edition of 1915, which at least confirms it was a legible feature on the landscape for the better part of two centuries. What complicates the picture slightly is the north-eastern section of the drystone wall, beneath which a broad spread of collapsed stone may point to an earlier enclosing element predating the wall that is visible today. Whether this represents a rebuilt boundary or something altogether different has not been resolved. Two cashels lie close by, one approximately 30 metres to the north-north-east, the other around 71 metres to the south-south-west, and a steep gorge drops away to the east.

The mountain rises to 983 feet above sea level, and the enclosure sits on rough grazing land that still carries the character of a working upland landscape. The surrounding field system, of which this structure forms one small part, is the broader context that gives it meaning, and the cluster of ring walls Westropp identified here remains, as he suggested, genuinely curious.

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