Enclosure, Leamaneigh More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Leamaneigh More, in County Clare, there is a recorded enclosure, a monument formally catalogued and assigned a place in the national inventory of Irish archaeological sites.
Beyond that fact, the details remain elusive, which is itself a small reminder of how much of Ireland's archaeological landscape exists in the gap between formal recognition and public knowledge.
Leamaneigh More sits in the Burren fringe country of east Clare, a landscape already crowded with prehistoric and early medieval remains. Enclosures of this kind typically refer to roughly circular or oval areas defined by an earthen bank, a stone wall, or a combination of both, and they appear across Ireland in forms ranging from ring forts used as defended farmsteads in the early medieval period to earlier Bronze Age enclosures whose functions are less easily pinned down. Whether this particular example is a rath, a cashel, a field enclosure, or something older is not currently documented in publicly available records. The townland name itself carries interest: Leamaneigh, sometimes rendered Leamaneh, is associated with the nearby Leamaneh Castle, a tower house later extended into a semi-fortified house, connected in local memory with the formidable Máire Rua O'Brien, who held the property in the seventeenth century. Whether the enclosure at Leamaneigh More has any relation to that later history, or predates it by centuries, remains an open question.