Enclosure, Rinnamona, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rinnamona, Co. Clare

On the crest of a south-facing slope in Rinnamona, County Clare, a quietly puzzling D-shaped enclosure sits in open pasture, its outline just legible enough to reward a careful eye.

The shape itself is the curiosity: most early enclosures in Ireland are roughly circular, the product of a ditch or bank thrown up around a homestead or farmyard, but this one has a straight eastern side some 15.8 metres long, formed by a drystone wall, with the curving remainder of the boundary described by banks of earth and stone that barely rise above the surrounding ground.

The enclosure spans around 20 metres east to west internally, though "poorly preserved" is an honest description. The bank running from the south-west is gapped in places and carries a scatter of large field stones, some over a metre in length, that appear to have been added at a later period, possibly when farmers were clearing the surrounding land and found the enclosure's edge a convenient place to deposit spoil. The bank on the western and northern arc is even less substantial, rising no more than 30 centimetres at its highest. A pile of stones inside the south-western corner adds another layer of ambiguity. Despite this accumulated disorder, the enclosure was considered significant enough to be marked on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1920, suggesting it was a recognisable feature in the landscape across at least two centuries of modern mapping. A second enclosure of similar character lies roughly 60 metres to the west, hinting that this corner of Clare may once have held more structured activity than the current pasture implies.

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Pete F
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