Enclosure, Sheshodonnell, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In a patch of rough pasture in Sheshodonnell, County Clare, a modest grassed-over wall traces the outline of an enclosure roughly sixteen metres east to west and eleven metres north to south.
It sits at the northern edge of a natural hollow in the ground, and were you not looking for it, you would likely walk past it without a second thought. That unobtrusiveness is part of what makes it worth noticing.
The enclosure forms one layer within what appears to be an extensive multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape here has been divided, worked, and reorganised across several different eras, with boundaries from one period cutting across or overlapping those from another. The hollow itself is considerably larger than the enclosure, stretching roughly seventy-five metres east to west and forty-five metres north to south, and it too has been enclosed by a later wall running along its northern side. The relationship between these two features, the smaller internal enclosure and the larger hollow around it, suggests that whoever worked this land in later times recognised an existing boundary and built around it rather than through it. The site was identified through satellite imagery from Digital Globe, captured between 2011 and 2013, and noted by Conn Herriott.
