Enclosure, Uggoon, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Uggoon, Co. Clare

In the townland of Uggoon in County Clare, on a south-east-facing slope, sits an oval earthwork that nobody has been able to properly examine.

Not because it is remote, exactly, but because a forestry plantation, by 2018 around ten years old and still un-thinned, had grown so dense around it that access was simply impossible.

The feature appears on all Ordnance Survey historic mapping as a roughly oval area, measuring approximately 50 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 35 metres across the other way, defined by a single enclosing element. Enclosures of this kind, typically a bank or fosse marking out a roughly circular or oval space, are found widely across Ireland and often associated with early medieval settlement, though without access the function of this particular example remains unconfirmed. It was listed as a possible enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. When a field inspection was carried out in 2018, the plantation had made it unreachable. Aerial imagery from Digital Globe showed the forestry planted right up to the outer edge of the enclosure, with drainage channels cut to its southern and north-western margins, leaving the earthwork itself as a kind of accidental island within the trees.

The situation at Uggoon is a fairly common predicament for low-profile archaeological sites in areas given over to commercial forestry. The enclosure has been mapped, catalogued, and photographed from above, yet the ground beneath the canopy has never been properly recorded. What the single enclosing element actually looks like, how well-preserved it is, whether anything survives inside, remains genuinely unknown.

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Pete F
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