Enclosure, Liscullaun, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Liscullaun, Co. Clare

In the improved pastureland of Liscullaun, Co. Clare, a field boundary does double duty.

An electric fence cuts across what was once a circular enclosure, running east to west through land that has been grazed so long and so thoroughly that the monument beneath it has all but ceased to exist as a physical object. You would walk across it without pausing. That near-invisibility is itself the point of interest: this is a place that survives more as a cartographic memory than as anything you can readily put your hand on.

The enclosure was recorded on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a circular feature roughly 25 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west, defined by a bank that seems to have been open at the western side. Enclosures of this kind, often called ringforts or raths in the Irish context, were typically used as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, with the surrounding bank and, usually, an external ditch or fosse providing a degree of security for livestock and settlement. At Liscullaun, however, the bank has been levelled to the point where only a faint oval scarp remains, measuring approximately 20 metres by 18 metres, and reaching no more than 0.6 metres in height at its most pronounced point on the eastern arc. The western and northern portions have been reduced almost completely to nothing. No fosse is visible at ground level, though aerial photography may yet reveal a trace of one beneath the grass.

What the site lacks in visible drama it compensates for in context. Set on a gentle east-north-east-facing slope, the location commands good views across the surrounding landscape to the north, east, and south, which is consistent with the kind of positioning early medieval communities tended to favour. The monument has been absorbed so completely into the working field that its edges are now defined more by subtle undulations in the turf than by anything a casual eye would catch.

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