Enclosure, Magheranraheen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On a ridge above Ballyeighter Lough in County Clare, a large oval enclosure has effectively vanished from the ground while remaining legible from the sky.
The earthwork, roughly 70 metres across its longer axis and 63 metres across its shorter one, was defined in its original form by a bank some five metres wide and an outer fosse, or ditch, running around it at approximately seven metres wide. At ground level today, centuries of farming have levelled it almost entirely. It is only in satellite imagery from the 2010s that its outline re-emerges, faintly but unmistakably, pressed into the pasture of a gentle northeast-southwest ridge.
The enclosure's history of disappearance and rediscovery plays out across successive maps. When the Ordnance Survey produced its first six-inch maps in the 1830s, the site was not recorded as a monument at all; the ground was shown as tree-covered, the earthwork presumably obscured or already diminished beneath the canopy. By the time the OS returned for its 25-inch survey in 1897, the enclosure had been noted and hachured, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthen feature, and it appears again on the revised six-inch Cassini edition of 1920. Sometime after that, it slipped below the threshold of visible archaeology altogether. A later field boundary, which now doubles as the townland boundary between Magheranraheen, also known as Rockforest, and Treanmanagh to the south, runs directly over part of the perimeter, quietly absorbing the monument into the working geometry of the land. Nearby, just over 80 metres to the south-southeast, there is a holy well, and the road running to the immediate west of the enclosure carries the name Sir Donat's Road, a designation that hints at older local histories without spelling them out.