Structure, Canon Island, Co. Clare

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Utility Structures

Structure, Canon Island, Co. Clare

On the eastern shore of Canon Island, rising from the tidal mudflats of the Fergus Estuary, there is a single wooden stake.

That is, more or less, the entirety of it. It has been formally recorded, catalogued, and assigned a site number, which places it in the same archival world as round towers, megalithic tombs, and medieval abbeys. The estuary, which feeds into the Shannon just south of Ennis, is a place where the water is rarely quite still and the shoreline shifts with the tide, and it is the kind of environment where such fragments of wood can survive for centuries, preserved by waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions.

The stake sits approximately fifteen metres west of a cluster of similar stakes recorded separately as Canon Island 32. Researchers working on the intertidal archaeology of the area noted it in 2010, suggesting it may be associated with that neighbouring group. Fish traps and weirs built from driven wooden stakes were common features of Irish estuaries and river mouths from the early medieval period onward, and a lone outlying post is exactly the sort of thing that might represent the edge of a larger structure, a repaired section, or simply a remnant that survived while the rest decayed or was removed. Without further investigation, its precise function and date remain open questions.

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Pete F
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