Enclosure, Mooghaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
Within the sprawling prehistoric landscape of Mooghaun in County Clare, one small feature sits quietly just ten metres north of a gap in the middle rampart of the great hillfort: a low, roughly circular enclosure whose purpose nobody has yet been able to explain.
It measures roughly 11.5 metres north to south and 14.5 metres east to west on the outside, defined by a stony bank averaging about 2.4 metres wide. The bank survives best to the south and south-west, where it still reaches about 0.4 metres in height. Unusually, the interior of the enclosure sits lower than the surrounding ground, except at the north-west, and at its centre stands a small cairn, a deliberate pile of stones whose relationship to the enclosure itself remains unclear.
The enclosure was excavated in 1995 as part of the North Munster Project of the Discovery Programme, a large-scale archaeological research initiative that worked across the region during the 1990s. Despite that excavation, no direct evidence emerged to confirm either the date of construction or the function of the feature. Eoin Grogan, writing in 2005, proposed a middle to late Bronze Age date on the basis of structural similarities to comparable enclosures identified elsewhere in the region, placing it broadly in the period between roughly 1500 and 700 BC. It is not an isolated anomaly: two more substantial enclosures lie approximately 22 metres and 47 metres to the north-north-east and north-east respectively, suggesting that this corner of the Mooghaun hillfort complex was once organised in ways that archaeology has only partially begun to recover. Mooghaun hillfort itself is one of the largest later Bronze Age hillforts in Ireland, its multiple concentric ramparts enclosing a considerable area of elevated ground above the south Clare landscape, which makes every subsidiary feature within it a potential piece of a still-incomplete picture.