Enclosure, Sheshodonnell, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Sheshodonnell, Co. Clare

In a rough pasture in Sheshodonnell, County Clare, a low bank of earth and stone traces out a near-rectangular shape in the ground, easy to miss and easy to misread as just another field boundary.

It is neither. The bank, averaging three metres wide and rising to about 1.4 metres on its outer face, encloses a space roughly fourteen metres by eleven metres internally, its fern-covered floor sitting in a slight hollow. Blackthorns have colonised the northwestern edge, and a later field wall, partly collapsed and spilling rubble across the northeast, has been built directly over the older structure, compressing two distinct episodes of land use into a single untidy seam.

The enclosure sits within what surveyors describe as a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it accumulated its boundaries and divisions across several different eras rather than being laid out in a single act of planning. The enclosure itself is the older element, and its age is not precisely recorded, though this type of earth and stone bank enclosure is a form found across early medieval Ireland, often associated with small farmsteads or the management of livestock. What is clear is that by 1842, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the feature was already visible and considered worth marking. It appears again on the Cassini edition of 1920, confirming it was a recognised landmark across at least eighty years of modern mapping. Three field walls radiate outward from the enclosure at the southeast, south-southeast, and south-southwest, suggesting the structure once served as a kind of organisational anchor for the surrounding land, with boundaries spreading out from it like spokes.

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Pete F
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