Enclosure, Rinnamona, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rinnamona, Co. Clare

A low ring of earth and stone sits in flat pasture near Rinnamona in County Clare, easy to walk past without registering it as anything other than a slight irregularity in the field.

What it represents is a common enough feature in the Irish landscape, an enclosure of the kind built across many centuries, typically to define a farmstead or settlement, though this one survives in a fragmentary and worn-down state that makes any confident interpretation difficult.

The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring just over fifteen metres across internally and nearly twenty-three metres at its outer extent. The boundary is formed by a low earth and stone bank, no more than forty centimetres high on the interior and barely ten centimetres proud of the surrounding ground on the outside. Along its upper surface, from the south-west around to the north and back to the south-east, a drystone wall runs for much of the circuit, standing up to about one and a half metres at its highest point. The bank itself is most legible at the south-east and south-west, elsewhere having been reduced almost to nothing. A road, running roughly east to west, has cut through the southern edge at some point after the enclosure was built, removing whatever boundary existed there and leaving the monument incomplete. The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch plan of 1897 and again on the Cassini edition of the six-inch map from 1920, suggesting it was still sufficiently visible at those dates to warrant marking. A second enclosure of similar character lies roughly sixty metres to the east, raising the possibility that the two were once related, perhaps part of the same small agricultural complex, though the ground between them offers no obvious answer.

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Pete F
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