Enclosure, Bishopsquarter, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Bishopsquarter, Co. Clare

Squeezed onto a shelf of pastureland barely ten metres wide, this circular enclosure in Bishopsquarter occupies one of the more precarious positions a prehistoric or early medieval structure could choose: a narrow terrace caught between stretches of bare karst limestone on a south-south-east-facing slope, roughly seven hundred metres back from the shore.

The karst on either side, that distinctive exposed limestone pavement scoured clean by millennia of weathering, makes the thin strip of usable ground feel almost deliberate, as though whoever built here was making the most of the only workable soil available.

The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, marked with hachures, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a roughly circular earthwork or enclosure. On the ground, the western boundary is formed by a single wall of large stone blocks set along a limestone terrace, while elsewhere the perimeter is defined by sizeable blocks laid transversely across the line of the enclosure. This combination of natural rock feature and constructed walling is not unusual in the Burren region of County Clare, where limestone is abundant and builders rarely had to look far for material. The site is now heavily overgrown with thorn and briar, which makes the precise character of the structure difficult to assess from the surface.

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