Enclosure, Murrooghkilly, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On the south-western slopes of Gleninagh Mountain in County Clare, a small plateau holds a field that barely registers in the landscape yet has quietly accumulated a paper trail spanning decades.
It is subrectangular in shape, roughly 26 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, and its boundary is a single drystone wall, the kind of construction where stones are laid without mortar, relying entirely on their own weight and fit. By 1997, when someone walked up to look at it properly, the wall was already in poor condition. A handful of associated fields sit nearby, suggesting this was once a modest working unit of land rather than an isolated oddity.
The site appeared on Tim Robinson's map of the Burren in 1977, one of the celebrated hand-drawn surveys through which Robinson documented the topography and archaeology of this limestone region in extraordinary detail. That early cartographic notice was enough to bring it into the official record, where it was listed as an enclosure complex in both the 1992 and 1996 iterations of the national monument registers. The gap between the label and the reality is instructive: what the registers called a complex turned out, on the ground, to be a modest and weathered field boundary on a quiet hillside above Gleninagh.