Enclosure, Rathnee, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathnee, Co. Cork

There is an enclosure at Rathnee in north County Cork that most people have never seen and, in one sense, never could.

It exists, or is most legible, from the air. In a photograph taken in July 1967, the outline of a roughly circular enclosure, approximately fifty metres in diameter, resolves itself not as upstanding earthwork but as a cropmark, the ghostly differential in how crops grow over buried features pressing through the soil to reveal itself only when viewed from altitude and in the right light.

What the photograph records is the cropmark of a fosse, a fosse being a defensive or boundary ditch, following a near-circular course. Alongside it, a narrower concentric fosse is faintly traceable along a south-west to north-east arc. The presence of two such ditches, one inside the other, is the detail that gives the site its quiet interest. Enclosures of this general type are common enough across Ireland, many of them the remains of early medieval ringforts, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a firm date or function to any particular example. What is unusual here is that the site survives not as a visible mound or earthen bank but almost entirely as a buried trace, its form recoverable only because aerial photography, particularly in dry summers when crops stress at different rates over disturbed subsoil, can read what ground-level observation cannot.

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Pete F
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