Enclosure, Poulgorm, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Poulgorm, Co. Clare

On a slightly raised patch of rocky grazing land in County Clare, there is a circular enclosure that has spent years listed in official heritage records without quite earning its place there.

Roughly twenty metres across at its widest, it sits on open ground with higher terrain rising to the east, defined by a drystone wall, the kind of dry-laid, mortarless stonework common throughout the west of Ireland, that appears to be of modern construction rather than ancient origin. The wall is incomplete, broken by several gaps, with loose stone scattered at its base.

The site was recorded as an enclosure in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, the two principal inventories through which the Irish state identifies and protects archaeological features. When someone finally visited the site in 1998, the inspection raised quiet doubts. The phrase "apparently modern" carries considerable weight in this context: it is the careful language of a surveyor who found something that looks like a field boundary or a stock enclosure rather than anything prehistoric or medieval. The interior dimensions, twenty metres north to south and eighteen metres east to west, are consistent with any number of functional rural structures. Whether it was ever intended as a heritage site at all remains, at best, an open question.

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Pete F
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