Sheep fold, Pouleenacoona, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Sheep fold, Pouleenacoona, Co. Clare

At Pouleenacoona in Co. Clare, a field that looks entirely unremarkable from the ground conceals the ghost of something considerably older.

What the Ordnance Survey cartographers of 1842 recorded simply as a sheep fold was, beneath its workaday function, the remnant of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure typically built as a farmstead and defined by a substantial circular dry-stone wall. By the time surveyors arrived to record it in 1997, the original structure had long since been absorbed into a paddock, its ancient fabric pressed into service as agricultural infrastructure in the way that happened so often across the Irish countryside.

The 1997 field survey found the site in poor condition but still legible. The roughly circular enclosure measured nearly 28 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west internally, and what remained was a wide modern wall, between 0.4 and 1.1 metres high, sitting directly on top of the older cashel foundations. The original outer facing-stones were most clearly visible along the south-west, giving some sense of the earlier structure underneath. Two gaps, each about 3 metres wide, opened at the south-west and north-west, most likely introduced during the later rebuilding rather than original features. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map named it as a sheep fold, and the same structure appeared again on the 1915 edition, suggesting it remained in active use across that period. Between those two map editions and what surveyors found in 1997, the site had slipped from functioning paddock to levelled ground.

Today there is nothing to see at the surface. The land has been cleared and the walls removed or reduced to nothing visible at ground level. What survives does so invisibly, as sub-surface stonework that shows up as a crop mark and parch mark in satellite imagery from the early 2010s, the buried foundations interrupting moisture retention in the soil above them in a pattern that aerial photography can still read, even where the human eye finds only grass.

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