Enclosure, Ballyryan, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyryan, Co. Clare

A low circular wall sits on a bare limestone terrace in Ballyryan, County Clare, about three hundred metres back from the Atlantic.

It is not immediately obvious what it was for. The structure is a drystone enclosure, meaning it was built without mortar, its stones fitted and stacked by hand, and it forms a near-perfect circle eighteen metres across. The wall survives to roughly a metre in height and is about half a metre thick. Most of the stones are laid flat and horizontal, but a short stretch running from the east-northeast to the east-southeast contains stones that have been deliberately set on their edges, a subtle variation in technique that stands out against the otherwise consistent coursing and whose purpose is not recorded.

Drystone enclosures of this kind appear across the west of Ireland and can date to almost any period, from the early medieval centuries through to relatively recent agricultural use. They served various functions, from containing livestock to marking boundaries or enclosing a habitation site, and without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a confident date or purpose to a particular example. What can be said of this one is that its position was clearly chosen with care. The terrace is level and exposed, with open sightlines to the south-southeast and northwest, and the sea lies just beyond its western edge. The grass-covered interior is largely flat, though patches of bare bedrock break the surface in places, suggesting the ground was never deeply worked.

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