Enclosure, Knockyclovaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Knockyclovaun, in County Clare, there is an enclosure old enough to have been formally recorded as an archaeological monument, yet quiet enough that almost nothing about it has made its way into the public record.
It sits on the map as a fact without a story attached, which is itself a kind of curiosity.
An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is broadly any defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these. In the Irish landscape they can range from prehistoric ritual sites to early medieval farmsteads, and distinguishing one type from another often requires close survey work. Knockyclovaun is a small townland in Clare, a county whose landscape holds an extraordinary density of such features, many of them still incompletely understood. Without further detail on date, dimensions, or construction type, the enclosure here remains an outline rather than a portrait, a shape in the ground that has yet to have its particular history drawn out.
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