Enclosure, Leana, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In a field in Leana, County Clare, there is an ancient enclosure that no longer exists above ground, yet can still be seen from space.
The site, roughly subcircular in shape and measuring approximately 40 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, survives only as a faint ghost: the compressed traces of a broad bank, perhaps 10 metres wide, pressed flat into what is now ordinary improved pasture.
The enclosure was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1842, marked with hachures, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature. It appeared again on the Cassini edition of the same map in 1920, still present, still worth noting. By the time anyone went to look in 1998, it had been levelled. Agricultural improvement, the process of draining, ploughing, and smoothing land to maximise its productivity, claimed the monument at some point in the intervening decades. A nearby mound, recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps just 10 metres to the west-northwest of the enclosure, has also been levelled. The two losses together suggest a small but meaningful cluster of antiquity that once occupied this corner of Clare, now gone from the ground entirely.
What makes the site quietly arresting is that satellite imagery from successive years, 1995, the early 2010s, and as recently as 2018, continues to reveal the enclosure's outline. The broad bank may have been flattened, but differential growth in the grass above it traces the old circuit with enough consistency to be legible from above. It is an odd form of survival: invisible to someone walking across the field, yet readable to anyone looking down.
