Gateway, Lisnanard, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Utility Structures
In the wet pastureland of Lisnanard, in County Clare, a freestanding gateway rises to roughly two and a half metres with no building obviously attached to it.
The surrounding ground is heavily overgrown and undulating, which makes the structure feel more anomalous still: a formal architectural threshold, carefully constructed, opening onto nothing now legible. It is the kind of thing that stops you mid-field and makes you wonder what it was once guarding, or announcing.
The gateway is trapezoidal in plan, slightly wider at its northwest face than at its southeast, and built from randomly coursed limestone and mortar. Stressed quoins, the shaped corner stones that give a wall its structural integrity and a degree of decorative formality, run up each edge. The doorway itself is just under a metre wide and spans nearly two metres in height, covered by a row of seven or eight flat lintels stacked to a combined depth of around sixty centimetres, with a layer of rubble masonry above that. What survives on the southeast face includes the remnants of a string course, a horizontal projecting band that in traditional masonry often marks a change in floor level or simply adds visual articulation, and a low plinth at ground level. Inside the northwest projecting walls, pairs of opposing recesses face each other, small and shallow, their original function now uncertain. Whether they held timber fixtures, gate hardware, or served some other purpose is unclear. The original height of the structure as a whole is also uncertain, suggesting that what stands today is not necessarily the full extent of what was once there.