Enclosure, Moydilliga, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Moydilliga, Co. Cork

Something unusual appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of this part of north Cork in both 1905 and 1935: a diamond-shaped area, roughly forty metres across in each direction, planted with trees and enclosed by a solid line, its sides very slightly concave.

Distinctive enough on paper, it was apparently known locally as a "ring", a word that gestures towards the long tradition of circular or roughly circular enclosures scattered across the Irish landscape. The geometry here was not quite circular, though, and that alone sets it apart from the more common ringfort or rath. By the time anyone thought to record it in detail, it was already gone, levelled during land reclamation work in the 1980s.

The site sat in pasture approximately 250 metres south of Modeligo House, on the east side of the avenue leading to the property. Whether the feature was primarily a tree ring, a planted enclosure serving some ornamental or boundary function associated with the estate, or something older pressed into later use is not entirely clear. What can be said is that it was legible enough on two separate OS six-inch map editions to be traced with confidence, and that a second enclosure, a circular one, lies about eighty metres to the south-east in the same field, suggesting this corner of the townland of Moydilliga may once have held more structured use of the land than the present pasture implies. The two features together point to a landscape with layered histories, even if one of them now exists only as a cartographic outline and a local memory of a ring that is no longer there.

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