Enclosure, Cloghera, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Cloghera, in County Clare, there is a recorded archaeological enclosure.
That much is certain. The details beyond that, the shape of it, the period it belongs to, whether it is a ringfort enclosing a long-vanished farmstead or something older and harder to categorise, remain officially undocumented in any publicly accessible form. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is broadly what it sounds like: a defined area set apart from its surroundings by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and the term covers an enormous range of human activity across thousands of years of Irish prehistory and early history.
Cloghera is a small rural townland in Clare, a county whose landscape holds an unusual concentration of earthworks, field systems, and enclosures of various periods. Many of these features survive as low, grass-covered banks that are easy to overlook in passing but reveal their geometry clearly from above or in the low light of a winter afternoon. Without specific documentation for this particular site, it is not possible to say who built it, when, or why. It exists, for now, as a placeholder in the archaeological record, a shape in the land that has been noticed and assigned a reference number but not yet fully investigated or described.