Enclosure, Kilcolman, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcolman, Co. Cork

Along a roadside in Kilcolman, County Cork, a fence post may be the only thing marking the spot where a small circular enclosure once stood.

The enclosure appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, rendered in hachures, the fine radiating lines that nineteenth-century cartographers used to suggest raised earthworks and banks. It measured roughly ten metres in diameter, about the footprint of a modest house, and even then it was already being bisected along its east-west axis by a roadside fence. At some point after that map was drawn, it disappeared entirely. No bank, no ditch, no surface irregularity remains.

Small circular enclosures of this kind are common enough across Ireland that their absence is easily overlooked. Many are the remains of ring forts, or raths, the enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, though some may be older or later in date. At ten metres across, this one sat at the smaller end of the scale, modest even by the standards of the type. The 1842 map captures it at a moment when it was still legible to a surveyor, if already compromised by the fence line cutting through it. What happened afterwards, whether it was deliberately levelled for agriculture, eroded gradually, or simply absorbed into the verge, is not recorded.

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Pete F
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