Enclosure, Ballycasheen, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballycasheen, Co. Clare

On the edge of Ballycasheen in County Clare, there is a site that appears on two successive Ordnance Survey maps, is described by a respected antiquarian, and yet, when someone finally went to look for it in any meaningful way, had effectively ceased to exist.

That quiet disappearance is, in its own way, as interesting as whatever was once there.

The site sits at the base of a south-facing slope amid scrub and karst limestone, the distinctive bare, fissured rock that defines much of the Clare landscape. It was recorded with hachuring, the cartographic shorthand for an earthwork or raised feature, on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and still partially marked on the 1897 twenty-five-inch revision. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1905, noted it among a cluster of cahers in the area, cahers being the local term for stone-walled ringforts, the roughly circular enclosures that were once farmsteads and settlement sites across early medieval Ireland. He described "the mere foundations of three other cahers, two of small dimensions" lying in the valley at Cahermacon and on the edge of Ballycasheen. The language is already elegiac; Westropp was recording ruins, not monuments. When an inspector visited the location in 1998, no archaeological feature could be identified at all. Clearance work in the fields to the east and south-east had pushed spoil into the area, burying or obscuring whatever ground-level traces may have survived into the twentieth century.

What remains is a kind of cartographic ghost: a feature confidently mapped across two editions of the OS survey, described in print, and then gradually erased not by time alone but by the ordinary business of agricultural land management. The Clare countryside holds dozens of such sites, their presence now legible only in old maps and the notes of people who looked before the spoil arrived.

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