Enclosure, Slievecarran, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Slievecarran, Co. Clare

At the southern end of Slievecarran, a limestone plateau in the Burren of County Clare, an old enclosure sits on a south-facing slope in a way that makes it difficult to separate from the geology around it.

Its eastern wall is not a wall at all in the conventional sense, but a low natural cliff, one edge of the kind of hollow that pocks this landscape throughout. Whoever built here recognised what the land was already doing and incorporated it, using the earth's own contours as part of the boundary.

The enclosure is roughly D-shaped, approximately 52 metres from north to south and 38 metres from east to west. Its remaining sides are defined by mound walls, the low, broad banks of compacted earth and stone typical of early field boundaries in the west of Ireland. It sits within a larger field system that spreads across the whole plateau, suggesting this was not an isolated structure but one element of a more organised agricultural or pastoral landscape. A second enclosure is attached directly to its western side, hinting at a sequence of use or expansion over time. The Burren's unusual geology, where thin soils sit over a fractured limestone karst riddled with hollows, fissures, and sheltered microclimates, made the plateau attractive to early farming communities, and traces of such activity survive here in some density. The enclosure is identifiable on aerial photography from both the Digital Globe and Ordnance Survey Ireland collections, spanning roughly 2011 to 2018, which is often how features like this are confirmed when ground visibility is limited.

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Pete F
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