Enclosure, Ardra, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ardra, Co. Cork

At Ardra in County Cork, there is an archaeological site that exists almost entirely on paper.

A circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter sits on a south-facing slope below the crest of a ridge, currently under tillage, yet it leaves no visible trace whatsoever on the ground. No earthworks, no hollow, no rise in the soil. The only reason anyone knows it was ever there is a broken line drawn by an Ordnance Survey cartographer in 1842.

That 1842 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, produced as part of the first systematic large-scale mapping of Ireland, recorded landscape features with a thoroughness that has since proved invaluable to archaeologists. The surveyors noted boundaries, enclosures, and earthworks that were already fading in their own time, and in this case they caught something that has since vanished entirely into the ploughsoil. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular and of this scale, are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often forming the boundary of a farmstead or small agricultural unit, though without excavation it is impossible to say with any certainty what period or purpose this particular example belongs to. What can be said is that by the time anyone thought to look for it on the ground, it was already gone.

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