Enclosure, Lougharuane, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lougharuane, Co. Cork

In a field near Lougharuane in North Cork, there is no visible monument to speak of, no earthwork rising from the ground, no stone to catch the eye.

The only evidence that something once stood here came from the air, when a summer aerial survey in July 1989 caught the faint signature of a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter. What the camera recorded was a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears in dry conditions when buried ditches or banks affect how crops grow above them, leaving darker or lighter rings readable only from altitude.

The feature in question is the cropmark of a fosse, the ditch that would originally have defined the perimeter of a circular enclosure. Such enclosures are common across Ireland, ranging from prehistoric ceremonial sites to the more familiar ringforts of the early medieval period, when farmers and their families lived within low earthen banks for a degree of protection and status. Whether this particular enclosure was domestic, ritual, or funerary in purpose is not recorded. What gives the site a quiet additional interest is its situation within a cluster of related features. A ring-ditch, a type of circular cropmark often associated with prehistoric burial monuments, lies roughly 120 metres to the north, and a second circular enclosure sits approximately 220 metres to the northwest. The concentration of these features across a relatively small area of North Cork farmland suggests the landscape here has a longer and more layered history than its current, unremarkable appearance implies.

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Pete F
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