Enclosure, Pullagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the improved pasture of Pullagh, on a low east-west ridge in County Clare, there is an ancient enclosure that cannot actually be seen.
No earthwork rises above the grass, no wall breaks the surface, no ditch catches the eye. The site exists, in practical terms, only as a mark on a map.
The enclosure was recorded as a hachured feature on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in both 1842 and 1915, indicating that cartographers working across those decades could identify its outline well enough to trace it. It forms one of what appear to be two conjoined enclosures, a pairing in which two roughly circular or sub-circular enclosed areas share a boundary or were built in close relation to each other. The broader landscape here is one of partial reclamation, a narrow ridge crest under improved pasture, with rock-strewn hazel scrub pressing in from the west and north-east. By the time the site entered the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, it was already described as not visible at ground level. The land had quietly absorbed it.