Enclosure, Ballyfaudeen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In a patch of marshy pasture on a north-east-facing slope in County Clare, an oval earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, largely unnoticed and, until relatively recently, unrecorded.
The enclosure measures roughly 35 metres east to west and about 50 metres north to south, defined by a low earthen bank that is in places barely ten centimetres above the surrounding ground. Its edges are soft and its interior choked with rushes, offering no obvious clue as to what it once contained or why it was built here at all.
The site never appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard historical record against which Irish archaeological features are typically checked, which means it passed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without ever attracting a cartographer's attention. It was only when aerial photography became a routine tool of landscape survey that the enclosure came into view, added to the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 as a potential site identified from air photos, a category reserved for cropmarks, soil discolourations, or earthworks that register from above before anyone has set foot on them. Later orthophotography from between 2005 and 2012 confirmed its outline. Enclosures of this kind, low earthen banks forming a rough oval or circular boundary, are found across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say anything confident about the date or function of this particular example. What is clear is that at some point a modern wall and drain were cut straight through it on a north-east to south-west line, bisecting the enclosure and leaving its interior divided and its archaeology, whatever survives, disturbed.