Enclosure, Lackendarragh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
There is something quietly unsettling about a place that exists more completely on paper than it does in the ground.
At Lackendarragh in County Cork, a roughly circular enclosure some twenty-five metres across was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, rendered in the careful hachuring that cartographers used to indicate an earthwork of some consequence. Today, the field it once occupied shows no visible trace of what was there.
The enclosure belonged to a type common across Ireland, a circular or near-circular bank of earth or stone that would originally have defined a farmstead or enclosed agricultural space, in some cases dating back to the early medieval period. What the 1842 map captured was already a partial survival: the bank had been incorporated into the field boundary system along its northern and northeastern edges, which is how these things tend to disappear, absorbed gradually into the working landscape rather than demolished outright. A large rectangular enclosure sits close by, its southeastern corner touching the northwestern side of the circular one, suggesting that whoever laid out the later field system was working around, and eventually through, an older arrangement of the land. The circular enclosure has since been levelled entirely, though the field fences to the north and east may still follow the line of the original bank without anyone particularly noticing.