Enclosure, Milltown, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the improved pasture of Milltown in County Clare, a large oval enclosure measuring roughly 34 metres by 30 metres exists on historical maps but leaves no trace whatsoever on the ground.
It is the particular quality of its invisibility that makes this site worth pausing over. Recorded faithfully on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and carried forward on later OS mapping, the enclosure has since been absorbed entirely into the surrounding farmland, its outline surviving only as a cartographic memory.
What the maps preserve is the outline of a substantial enclosure, oval in plan, oriented roughly northwest to southeast. Enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish prehistoric and early medieval landscape, typically formed by an earthen bank or ditch defining a domestic, agricultural, or ceremonial space, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What is more striking here is the company the enclosure once kept. Just five metres to its south lies the site of a megalithic structure, the kind of monument built from large upright stones, usually dating to the Neolithic or Bronze Age. Some fifteen metres to the southeast, a standing stone formerly occupied the ground, though it is no longer present. Three distinct monument types in close proximity suggest this corner of Clare was a meaningful place across a long span of time, even if the people who made it so left no written account of why.