Enclosure, Lisballyhay, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisballyhay, Co. Cork

On a south-west-facing hillslope in North Cork, a roughly thirty-metre-square enclosure once occupied the land at Lisballyhay, near the rise known as Cashlaunowen.

What makes it quietly notable is precisely how little of it remains. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a hachured trapezoidal enclosure, the hachuring indicating an earthwork with some visible relief at the time of survey. By the time anyone looked closely again, the ground had been turned to tillage and the enclosure levelled almost entirely into the landscape.

What survived, at least in part, appears to have been absorbed rather than demolished outright. The remains of a bank along the southern and eastern sides seem to have been folded into the existing field boundary system, the kind of quiet recycling of ancient earthworks that happened routinely as agricultural land was reorganised across Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A drainage ditch running outside the eastern field boundary may also reflect the site's former outline. Perhaps the most telling detail concerns a spring well that was marked at the north-eastern corner of the enclosure on the 1937 Ordnance Survey revision. By the time anyone went to verify it on the ground, no surface trace of it remained. The well had vanished as completely as the enclosure itself, leaving only the cartographic record as evidence that it had ever been there.

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Pete F
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