Enclosure, Aughrim, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Aughrim in County Clare, there sits a recorded enclosure, a term that in an Irish archaeological context typically refers to a roughly circular or oval boundary, defined by an earthen bank, a fosse, or a combination of both, that once enclosed a settlement, a farmstead, or perhaps a site of ritual significance.
These features are among the most common monuments in the Irish landscape, yet also among the least legible to the passing eye, often surviving as little more than a faint rise in a field or a curve in a hedgerow that only makes sense when viewed from above.
Beyond its classification and location, the specific details of this particular enclosure, its dimensions, its date, its condition, and whatever finds or associations may have been recorded, remain unavailable for the moment. What can be said is that Aughrim, like much of Clare, sits within a landscape that has been continuously shaped by human activity from the Neolithic onwards, and that enclosures of this kind can range in date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period, when ringforts, a closely related type, were constructed in their tens of thousands across Ireland as the basic unit of rural settlement.