Fish Weir, Lissan, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Water Management

Fish Weir, Lissan, Co. Clare

Along the west bank of the Fergus estuary, at the edge of Lissan West townland in County Clare, a row of wooden posts protrudes from the tidal mud.

There are at least nine of them, each roughly eight to ten centimetres in diameter, arranged in a short and somewhat irregular alignment running north-east to south-west over a distance of around six metres. What makes this modest scatter of timber unusual is what it represents: the probable remains of a stake weir, a simple but effective fish trap in which vertical posts were driven into the foreshore and connected with wicker or netting to intercept fish as the tide ebbed and left them stranded.

Stake weirs of this kind were used widely around the Irish coast from early medieval times onwards, and the Fergus estuary appears to have supported more than one. This particular structure is thought to date from the post-medieval period. Its discontinuous and irregular construction has prompted the suggestion that it was deliberately dismantled at some point, possibly to make way for a larger weir recorded a short distance downstream. That larger structure, if it superseded this one, may explain why so little of the original alignment survives, with the posts left behind as a kind of archaeological afterthought rather than the organised skeleton of a working trap. The interpretation draws on Aidan O'Sullivan's 2001 survey of the Fergus estuary, which documented intertidal structures along this stretch of the Clare coastline.

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Pete F
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