Enclosure, Derryorgan, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derryorgan, Co. Cork

A field in tillage on a south-east-facing slope in Derryorgan, County Cork, holds the faint remains of something that has been slowly erased from the landscape over centuries.

What was once substantial enough to be mapped in 1842 as a lozenge-shaped enclosure with clear hachuring, the cartographic convention used to indicate raised or embanked features, has since been ploughed almost flat. Today, the site survives as a roughly circular area measuring about 27 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, defined by a low scarp no more than half a metre at its highest, with a shallow external fosse, or ditch, still just perceptible at the margins.

The site's history as an object of study is itself a little tangled. Successive Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937 each recorded it differently, with the later editions showing a hachured arc suggesting a semicircular fosse of around 50 metres in diameter running from west-south-west to east-south-east. Because of this cartographic evidence, the site was included in T. B. Barry's 1981 survey of moated sites for County Cork. Moated sites are typically medieval enclosures surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, often associated with Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland from the late twelfth century onwards. Barry listed this as a candidate, though the classification rested on map evidence alone rather than excavation or fieldwork. Aerial photography has since revealed the enclosure more clearly as a cropmark, the buried fosse showing up as a difference in crop growth, with what appears to be an entrance gap to the north. Additional linear cropmarks to the south and east may represent levelled field boundaries, and a second enclosure lies in the eastern half of the same field.

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Pete F
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