Enclosure, Maryville, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Maryville, Co. Clare

In the undulating pastureland near Maryville in County Clare, there may or may not be an ancient enclosure.

That ambiguity is not a gap in the record so much as the point of it. The site first came to attention through a high-level Geological Survey of Ireland aerial photograph, which showed what looked like a prehistoric or early medieval enclosed feature. When a field investigator visited in July 1997, the ground gave nothing away. No earthwork, no crop mark, no visible trace.

The story did not quite end there. More recent aerial imagery from 2005 revealed a roughly circular feature, approximately 30 metres in diameter, in roughly the right location, which may correspond to the original observation. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common form across Ireland, ranging from the remains of ringforts used as farmsteads in the early medieval period through to prehistoric settlement boundaries, though without excavation it is impossible to say which, if either, category applies here. The site sits within what has been identified as a large multiperiod field system, suggesting the landscape around it has been worked and reorganised across many centuries. Two cashels, which are stone-walled enclosures typically associated with early medieval settlement, lie in the immediate vicinity, one approximately 75 metres to the north-east and another around 170 metres to the west-south-west. Archaeological testing carried out about 35 metres to the north-east of the site, prompted by a house extension rather than any targeted investigation, turned up no archaeological remains.

What remains on record is essentially a question mark in a field. The site is listed as a potential site identified from aerial photography, which is its own category of archaeological evidence, one that acknowledges the gap between what can be seen from altitude and what survives at ground level. In a landscape already known to contain multiple phases of human activity, the absence of visible remains does not settle the matter either way.

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