Lisanroum, Lisnanroum, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

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Lisanroum, Lisnanroum, Co. Clare

In the rough pasture of County Clare, a place was carefully recorded on three successive Ordnance Survey maps, and then, by the third, quietly written off.

By 1920, the cartographers had added a single, deflating word to the name they had been using since 1842: "Site of." Nothing remains above ground today.

The 1842 six-inch map showed a roughly square enclosure, approximately fifteen metres on each side, labelled "Lisnanroum." By the 1897 twenty-five-inch survey it had shifted slightly in recorded shape, now described as subrectangular and measuring around nineteen metres north to south by ten metres east to west, sitting against the northern edge of a sheepfold. The enclosure itself is likely the remnant of an earthen or stone fort, the kind of defended or enclosed settlement built across Ireland during the early medieval period, and it may correspond to a feature recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters under the name "Lismandrum." The letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century archive in which surveyors gathered local historical and topographical knowledge as they mapped the country, are one of the few places where such traces were noted before they vanished entirely. Whatever the original structure was, it sat on a plateau with only limited views to the north and east, higher ground rising to the west, and a road running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west about a hundred and thirteen metres to the east. The site lies within a multiperiod field system, suggesting the land has been worked and divided across many different eras.

The sheepfold shown on the 1897 map is still extant, which gives the landscape a kind of layered quality: one feature survives, the other is gone so completely that no surface trace remains. The fort, if that is what it was, has returned entirely to rough pasture.

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