Enclosure, Lyre Mountain, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lyre Mountain, Co. Cork

On the slopes of Lyre Mountain in County Cork, there is a circular enclosure that most people will never see.

Not because it is particularly remote in principle, but because dense forestry has effectively swallowed it whole, rendering it inaccessible to anyone without a very good reason, or a very determined disposition, to push through.

The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which means it was visible, and considered worth marking, at a time when the landscape looked quite different. The map shows it as circular, with a diameter of approximately eighteen metres. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish countryside; they are typically the remains of a rath or ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a bank and ditch defined a domestic space for a family and their livestock. Whether that is precisely what this one represents is not recorded, but the form is consistent with that tradition. What is clear is that by the time the forestry closed in around it, the site had passed out of easy reach, and whatever remains of that circular boundary now survives in the dark beneath the canopy.

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Pete F
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