Enclosure, Lisheeneagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
At the western edge of the Caher valley in County Clare, a large enclosure sits on a level terrace where improved farmland gives way to rough grazing, a boundary that in itself hints at long and layered use.
The enclosure stretches approximately 85 metres east to west, defined by a wall that is now largely grassed over, and it is the kind of place that registers more clearly from satellite imagery than from the ground. The southern portion has been cleared, but enough survives to suggest something considerably more complex than a simple field boundary.
What makes the site particularly interesting is the density of occupation evidence compressed within it. At the centre stands a square cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement in the west of Ireland, and alongside it are the foundations of two further structures. Then, overlying the enclosure's perimeter wall at the north-west corner, are the foundations of what appears to be a later house, one that was still standing, or at least roofed, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first-edition six-inch maps in the nineteenth century. That sequence, a cashel within a larger enclosure, additional house foundations, and finally a roofed building that postdates them all, suggests the terrace was returned to repeatedly across several centuries, each phase of occupation reshaping or simply sitting on top of what came before. The site also falls within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the enclosure itself is just one element in a much wider pattern of agricultural organisation across the valley.