Enclosure, Carnaun, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carnaun, Co. Clare

On a hillock rising out of the boggy pastureland of Carnaun in County Clare, there is an enclosure that has been quietly changing shape on paper for the better part of two centuries.

When the Ordnance Survey first mapped it in 1842, surveyors recorded it as a circular raised feature. By 1897, later editions were describing something distinctly different: a subrectangular form, its corners more angular, its outline more deliberate. Whether the ground itself shifted in the intervening decades, or whether earlier cartographers simply had a rougher view of it, is not entirely clear. What is certain is that the site sits prominently enough to command wide views across the surrounding hills, the kind of position that rarely goes unoccupied for long in the Irish landscape.

The enclosure measures roughly 33 metres north to south and just over 20 metres across, defined by a scarp, essentially a low earthen step or slope, that averages about 0.8 metres in height. This scarp survives reasonably well from the south-west around to the north-north-east, but the eastern and southern sides tell a different story. There, later field walls, one of them collapsed and one still standing, overlie the original perimeter, and beyond them there is no trace of the enclosure at all. The inference is that those sections were deliberately levelled, perhaps when the land was divided into agricultural plots in the post-medieval period. On the western side, a berm, a narrow flat shelf sitting at the base of the scarp, runs for about two metres in width, a detail that survives where the surrounding landscape did not disturb it. The interior is grass-covered and rises very slightly towards its centre, a subtle swelling that is easy to miss unless you are specifically looking for it.

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Pete F
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