Enclosure, Keatleysclose, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Keatleysclose, Co. Cork

A circular enclosure in a field near Keatleysclose, in north County Cork, exists as something that can only really be seen from the air.

No earthwork rises above the surface, no wall or bank marks its boundary at ground level. What survives instead is a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried ditches cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, typically taller and greener over filled-in features where moisture is retained, and visible only when conditions are right and an aircraft happens to be overhead.

The enclosure was identified in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989 as part of a systematic aerial survey programme. What the photograph revealed were two concentric fosses, or ditches, arranged in a circle roughly thirty metres in diameter. Double-ditched circular enclosures of this kind are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, and sometimes with prehistoric activity, though without ground investigation it is not possible to say more about the date or purpose of this particular site. A modern field fence cuts directly across the centre of the enclosure on a north-south axis, a reminder of how agricultural boundaries have been drawn and redrawn across landscapes that contain far older geometries underneath.

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