Sheep fold, Termon, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Sheep fold, Termon, Co. Clare

The Ordnance Survey cartographers who mapped this part of County Clare in 1842 recorded a circular enclosure in a shallow hollow of the karst and labelled it plainly: Sheep Fold.

That label, and the structure itself, have survived. What makes the place quietly odd is the mismatch between its name and its form. Despite what the map shows, the enclosure is not circular at all but triangular, roughly fourteen metres north to south and thirteen east to west, a small three-cornered pen tucked into gently undulating rough pasture with little sense of the broader landscape around it.

The walls that define the space have largely collapsed, their lower portions now buried under sod so that only the uppermost course of stonework is visible above ground. That visible course is unusual in itself: rather than the coursed or random rubble one might expect from a working agricultural enclosure, the stones here are set upright on edge, individual elements standing vertically, some projecting above the others like uneven teeth. The interior, where the southern wall has tumbled inward, is scattered with displaced boulders and cut slightly into the hillslope on its southern side, giving the floor an uneven but broadly level surface. The outer face of the wall stands to around 0.8 metres, the inner to roughly 0.55 metres, with a wall thickness of about 2.5 metres, substantial enough to suggest this was built to last rather than put together quickly for a season's grazing. Two other enclosures sit close by in the same landscape, one large and just eight metres to the west, another smaller one approximately 68 metres to the west-southwest, suggesting this corner of Termon was once quite deliberately organised around the management of animals on the limestone ground.

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