Enclosure, Poulnabrucky, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Poulnabrucky, Co. Clare

In the rough pasture at Poulnabrucky, County Clare, a modern drystone wall runs along the top of a much older stone bank, and most people who encounter it probably assume they are looking at nothing more than a typical field boundary.

They are not. Beneath the later stonework lies a rectangular enclosure whose origins predate the wall by a considerable stretch, sitting slightly raised above the surrounding ground and commanding views from west to east-south-east across a landscape that has been worked and divided by successive generations of farmers.

The enclosure measures roughly 31 metres north to south and 21.5 metres east to west, defined by a stone bank between 2.5 and 4 metres wide and standing to about 0.6 to 1 metre in height. Enclosures of this kind, formed by earthen or stone banks rather than ditches, were used throughout Irish prehistory and the early medieval period as farmsteads, cattle enclosures, or places of local significance, though the specific date and function of the Poulnabrucky example is not recorded. What is clear is that it was already old enough to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842, when it was marked on the six-inch edition using hachuring, a technique surveyors used to indicate raised earthworks or banks. It appeared again on the 1916 edition, suggesting the feature remained visible and recognisable across the intervening decades. The site sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the land around it carries traces of several distinct phases of agricultural use, each laid over or beside the last.

About 70 metres to the east lies the entrance to a feature recorded as Christy's Cave, which places the enclosure in quietly interesting company. Whether the two are related in any period of use is not known, but their proximity in a landscape already layered with older boundaries gives the site a quality that rewards a slow look around rather than a passing glance.

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Pete F
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