7.4.5 Enclosures

The term enclosure is a broad one, encompassing earthworks and crop marks as well as stone built enclosures that, apart from the thickness of their walls, could be classified as duns or forts. The recently excavated example at Barnluasgan is just such an example, where the walls of the later ‘enclosure’ proved to be no thicker than the underlying dun (Regan and Webb; 2006, 2007). Apart from the enclosure at Barnluasgan, which was occupied between the 2nd century BC – 1st century AD and might anyway sit more comfortably in the dun category, few of these sites have been dated or indeed excavated and while they might belong to the Iron Age could equally belong to other periods.