Turf stand, Fanore More, Co. Clare

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Turf stand, Fanore More, Co. Clare

On the limestone pavement above Fanore More in County Clare, a small drystone structure sits unregistered and largely unremarked, absent from both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1996.

It is not a church ruin, a fort, or a burial monument. It is a turf stand, the kind of vernacular structure that was built to store and season cut peat, and its very ordinariness is probably why it slipped through the net of formal record-keeping.

The structure is rectangular in plan, measuring 3.7 metres north to south and 1.2 metres east to west internally, built from flags and slabs arranged both horizontally and vertically in the drystone tradition, which uses no mortar, relying instead on careful placement and the weight of the stone itself. The walls stand roughly a metre high with an average width of half a metre. A gap of 0.6 metres at the northern end of the east wall would have allowed access, and at the southern end a single course of corbelling projects inwards by 0.2 metres, a detail that suggests some deliberate effort to shelter the interior from the elements. Corbelling, in which successive courses of stone overlap inward to form a rudimentary roof or overhang, is more commonly associated with early medieval structures in Ireland, but here it appears in a modest, functional form. The stand sits on a rough terrace of clint and grike pavement, the exposed limestone characteristic of the Burren, where flat slabs of rock are separated by deep fissures. Around 60 metres to the northwest, a cashel, a stone-walled early medieval enclosure, overlooks the same ground.

The immediate surroundings to the south are rough grazing land and heather, the kind of marginal terrain where turf cutting would have been a practical necessity rather than a choice. The stand itself is easy to miss, neither signposted nor celebrated, sitting in a landscape where the geology tends to draw most of the attention.

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Pete F
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