Enclosure, Crumlin, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Crumlin, Co. Clare

On a narrow rock terrace cut into the western face of a steep Clare hillside, at roughly four hundred feet above sea level, sit three ancient enclosures in a rough north-to-south line.

This southernmost one is easy to overlook, and for a long time cartographers did exactly that: it went unrecorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, appearing only on the later Cassini edition of 1915. The enclosure is subrectangular in plan, roughly thirty metres from north to south and twenty metres east to west, defined by a single drystone wall that varies in quality around its circuit. The eastern and south-southwestern sections are noticeably better built than the rest, which speaks to a history of partial rebuilding layered over much older fabric. A modern animal pen has been added against the wall at the southeast corner, and low field walls abut the enclosure on three sides, suggesting the site has remained folded into the working landscape long after whatever original purpose it served had been forgotten.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the area and wrote about all three enclosures in a 1905 paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. He described them plainly as "three rude old enclosures of slab masonry, partly rebuilt, but embodying ancient work, though neither regular nor massive," and concluded they were "evidently cattle bauns." A bawn, in the Irish context, is a walled enclosure used to secure cattle, the term most familiar from later plantation-era tower houses but applied here to what appears to be a much older tradition of stock management in the landscape. The interior of this particular enclosure sits in a natural hollow, a detail that suggests the builders worked with the contours of the exposed rock terrace rather than imposing a geometry upon it. The higher ground to the east overlooks the site, which would have made the terrace a somewhat sheltered but still exposed spot for penning animals on the fringes of the Burren.

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