Enclosure, Tulla, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Tulla, Co. Clare

Near Tulla in County Clare, there is a scheduled monument that no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

No earthwork, no stone, no visible trace remains above ground. What survives instead is a paper record of a thing that once existed, and the slowly accumulating evidence of how thoroughly it was erased.

Ordnance Survey mappers who worked the area in 1840 recorded a circular enclosure roughly 58 metres across, the kind of roughly circular earthen boundary, typically defined by a raised bank and sometimes a ditch, that was once a common feature of the Irish rural landscape, used variously for settlement, agriculture, or ceremonial purposes across many centuries. By the time later editions of the map were produced, the shape had shifted on paper too, appearing oval rather than circular, around 55 metres on its longer axis, and already being clipped at its south-eastern edge by a townland boundary. Officially, the monument entered the record as a rectangular enclosure, a different category entirely, suggesting some confusion about what exactly it was. An archaeological assessment carried out nearby in 2007 found only a low, grassed-over bank in the corner of a field, curving gently to the north-north-west, measuring about 34 metres long, 4.7 metres wide, and less than a metre high. The assessor concluded that the surrounding land had been reclaimed for improved pasture, and that the enclosure had almost certainly been levelled in that process, the single surviving bank representing, perhaps, only the western side of the original monument. By the time the site was visited again in 2017, even that remnant had gone. The rock outcrops close to the surface, and the field boundaries that now bisect the area, are all that remain where a structure of some kind once stood.

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