Enclosure, Ballygrady, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballygrady, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at Ballygrady with the naked eye, at least not from the ground.

The enclosure here exists, as far as the current record goes, only as a cropmark, a faint discolouration in the soil visible only from the air, where the buried ditch of a roughly circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across betrays itself through the differential growth of crops above it. It is the kind of archaeology that belongs entirely to the aerial photographer rather than the casual walker.

The cropmark was captured in July 1989 as part of an aerial survey, and what it reveals is the fosse, or boundary ditch, of an enclosure that once stood here. A fosse in this context is simply a dug ditch, typically forming the outer boundary of a settlement or enclosed farmstead. Circular enclosures of this type are commonly associated with early medieval Ireland, the period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when ringforts served as the basic unit of rural settlement across the country. Whether this site belongs to that tradition cannot be confirmed from the aerial evidence alone. What the photograph also shows is a linear cropmark extending north-westwards across the field from the enclosure's north-western side, suggesting some kind of associated feature or boundary, possibly a field boundary or an approach route. The site sits within a wider field system and, roughly 240 metres to the north-east, a second enclosure has also been recorded, hinting that this part of North Cork was more densely organised in the past than the present landscape suggests.

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Pete F
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