Enclosure, Meggagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
A small stone enclosure sitting in the middle of a Clare field sounds unremarkable enough, but this one has quietly accumulated a minor identity crisis over the decades.
For a time it appeared on annotated maps labelled as an ancient dwelling, and when it was formally catalogued in 1996 it was entered cautiously as a possible house site, the kind of designation that suggests something old and worth protecting. The reality, when someone finally went out to look properly in 1999, turned out to be rather more ambiguous.
On inspection, the structure proved to be a subrectangular enclosure roughly ten and a half metres in diameter, defined by a narrow stone wall standing about eighty centimetres high and no more than forty centimetres wide at its broadest. The construction appeared to be modern rather than ancient, which quietly unravels the earlier characterisation as an old dwelling. How it came to be annotated as an ancient structure in the first place is not recorded. It may have been a case of a fieldworker reading something into the shape of the thing from a distance or from a map, or it may simply reflect how easily a modest stone boundary can acquire the appearance of antiquity in the Irish landscape, where genuinely old structures of similar form are not uncommon. An enclosure of this type, had it been early medieval, might have functioned as a small farmstead or domestic compound, but nothing about this particular example supports that reading.