Gateway, Leamaneh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Utility Structures
On the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a pair of gate piers near Leamaneh in County Clare are marked in Gothic script, the cartographic convention used to denote antiquities and features of historical note.
That formal acknowledgement on paper is now the most substantial thing left of them. The piers themselves are gone.
A photograph from 1950 shows the two piers still standing on the south side of the road, roughly eighty metres south-west of the fortified house at Leamaneh, though already damaged. They were constructed from dressed limestone blocks, each with a rebate on the inside, the kind of stepped groove cut into masonry to receive a gate or door frame, indicating these were functional structures built to hang actual gates rather than purely decorative entrance markers. By the time the photograph was taken, loose stones from the western pier were already lying scattered nearby. At some point after 1950, both piers disappeared entirely. Leamaneh Castle itself, a 17th-century tower house with a later fortified manor house attached, still survives close by and is one of the more striking ruins in the Burren. The gate piers were in all likelihood the formal entrance approach to that complex, giving a sense of the ordered, demarcated estate that once extended around the house.
What remains at the site today is the road, the landscape, and the absence where the piers once stood. The castle ruin is visible from the road at the junction of the R476 and R480, and the approximate location of the lost piers lies a short distance to the south-west, though there is nothing now to mark the spot.
