Enclosure, Coole, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
There is a particular kind of archaeological site that exists more as a cartographic memory than as anything you could touch.
At Coole in County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres in diameter was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, marked in dotted lines on a south-facing pastoral slope. Today, no surface trace remains. The ground gives nothing away.
The dotted outline on the 1842 map is a small but telling detail. Ordnance Survey cartographers of that period used dotted or pecked lines to indicate features that were already indistinct or partially levelled, meaning this enclosure may have been fading from the landscape even as it was first being formally recorded. Circular enclosures of this general type are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often referred to as ring-forts or raths, where an earthen bank and ditch once defined a farmstead or its attached enclosure. A diameter of around twenty-five metres places this one at the smaller end of that tradition, suggestive of a modest agricultural enclosure rather than a high-status site. Whether it was ever more prominent, or whether cultivation and grazing steadily reduced it over the preceding centuries, is impossible to say from what survives.
