Enclosure, Grange, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
Some ancient features reveal themselves only from above.
At Grange in County Cork, a roughly U-shaped levelled bank, open to the west with a possible entrance to the east, is not visible to anyone walking the land in any conventional sense. It exists, at least as far as the record goes, as a soilmark, the kind of ghostly impression that appears in aerial photographs when buried or flattened earthworks cause crops or grasses to grow differently over their outlines. The shape itself is quietly suggestive, neither a typical ringfort nor an obvious field boundary, but something in between that has left just enough trace to be noticed and catalogued.
The soilmark was captured in an aerial photograph taken by Dr D.D.C. Pochin Mould in 1987. Pochin Mould was a prolific documentarian of Irish landscape and archaeology, and this image appears to have been one of the pieces of evidence used when compiling the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in the late 1990s. The enclosure sits in a landscape already well populated with related earthworks. Roughly sixty metres to the east lies a separate circular enclosure, and about three hundred metres to the north-east stands a ringfort, the type of roughly circular banked enclosure, usually dating to the early medieval period, that remains the most common surviving monument type across rural Ireland. Whether this cluster of features reflects a single period of activity or accumulated use across many centuries is unknown, but their proximity to one another suggests this corner of North Cork was, at some point, a busy and organised place.
Because the enclosure survives only as a soilmark rather than as a standing earthwork, there is little to see at ground level. The interest lies less in visiting the spot than in knowing it exists, a settlement trace or boundary feature that endured long enough in the soil to catch the light from the air, decades after whatever it once defined had been forgotten.