Enclosure, Lyroe, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lyroe, Co. Cork

In the forestry at Lyroe in mid Cork, a low circular earthwork sits quietly among the trees, its origins uncertain and its outline increasingly difficult to read.

The enclosure measures roughly eleven metres across, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone that rises only half a metre on the interior side and a little more on the exterior. It is a modest thing, easily overlooked, and the forestry planting has done nothing to help matters: the bank has been broken in several places by forestry activity, and both the bank itself and the ground it encloses are now planted with trees.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1938, where it appears as a small hachured circle, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthwork of this kind. Circular enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and can represent a wide range of uses and periods, from early medieval ringforts, which were typically farmsteads enclosed for the protection of livestock, to possible prehistoric ceremonial sites. At Lyroe, the enclosure is small enough that a domestic or agricultural interpretation seems plausible, though without excavation it is impossible to say more. What the 1938 map preserves is at least a record of the bank in a less disturbed state than it exists in today.

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Pete F
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