Enclosure, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

A field in Oldcourt, County Cork holds something that most people walking past would never notice: the faint trace of a circular enclosure that only became visible from the air.

The site exists, for practical purposes, as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features such as ditches or foundations cause the grass or crops above them to grow differently, revealing outlines that are otherwise invisible at ground level. In this case, the marks show arcs belonging to two concentric fosses, which are simply ditches, running close together in a roughly circular arrangement on the western side of a field boundary.

The cropmark was captured in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989 as part of a systematic survey programme. What it appears to show is the surviving portion of a circular enclosure measuring approximately twenty-five metres in diameter. The double-ditch arrangement, with two closely spaced rings, is a layout associated with enclosed settlements of early medieval Ireland, though without excavation it is impossible to be certain of the date or precise function. The northern arc is better preserved in the photographic record than the southern, and only the western side of the feature is clearly legible, the field fence having interrupted or obscured the rest.

There is little to see at ground level today. The value of this site lies less in what a visitor could observe on foot and more in what the aerial photograph revealed: the suggestion of a community or household that once organised its space within a defined circular boundary, now reduced to a difference in how the grass grows on a summer morning.

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Pete F
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