Greencolly Fort, Oughtmama, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Forts
On a hilltop straddling the Clare-Galway county boundary near Oughtmama, there is a fort that exists now only in cartographic memory.
Where an enclosure once stood, there is nothing to see at ground level, just a small cairn of boulders that almost certainly marks a trigonometrical survey point rather than anything older. The place is, in a quiet way, a lesson in how thoroughly the landscape can erase itself.
The 1838 edition of the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a subcircular enclosure here, roughly 60 metres from north to south, its western side opening directly onto a cliff edge. That detail, the way the structure apparently met or used the cliff as a natural boundary, suggests something deliberate in its siting, whether defensive, territorial, or both. By the time the 1922 edition of the same map was published, the enclosure had been levelled entirely, and the cartographers noted the change with the bracketed words "Site of", a small, deflating notation that surveyors used when a feature had disappeared between editions. Somewhere in those intervening decades, the structure was reduced to nothing visible.