Enclosure, Poulbaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the improved pastureland of Poulbaun, a tall, well-built wall curves through a working field, the last legible fragment of an enclosure that has been quietly losing ground for centuries.
The southern arc of the structure has been levelled entirely, its interior absorbed into the large field beside it, so that what was once a defined, bounded space now bleeds seamlessly into modern farmland. The wall that does survive, running from the south-west to the south-east, is notable for its construction: a mixture of single and double walling, carefully built, yet without the dressed facing stones associated with a cashel, the type of dry-stone ringfort common across the west of Ireland. Whatever purpose the enclosure originally served, the physical evidence suggests it was built with some intention and skill.
Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1915 both mark the enclosure as a solid line, confirming it was still a recognisable feature well into the modern era. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlements and used for storage or concealment, was recorded within the enclosure on Tim Robinson's map of 1977, republished in 1999. When the site was inspected in 1997, however, no trace of it could be found, suggesting either that it had been destroyed in the intervening years or that its location had been misidentified. A small animal pen butting up against the north-west corner of the enclosure appears on the 1916 Ordnance Survey map and is likely a much later addition, a practical afterthought rather than anything of historical weight. The enclosure sits within a notably dense cluster of related monuments: five other cashels and enclosures lie within the same field system, the nearest of them about a hundred metres to the west, which points to a landscape that was once intensively organised and occupied, even if much of that organisation is now invisible from the ground. A derelict farmhouse and its outbuildings stand just to the east, adding another layer of abandonment to a site that has been slowly unwinding for a long time.