Enclosure, Ballybraher, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballybraher, Co. Cork

In the pasture at Ballybraher in County Cork, on a north-facing slope, there is a site that no longer exists in any visible sense.

An oval enclosure, roughly 30 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, but by the time anyone thought to look for it on the ground, it had been levelled entirely. There is no surface trace. The grass grows over it without interruption.

Enclosures of this type are a common feature of the Irish archaeological landscape, ranging from simple ringforts, which were farmsteads enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, to more ceremonial or defensive structures. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say with certainty what a levelled example once was, or when it was built. What the 1842 map records is not the living site but already, perhaps, a fading one, its banks reduced enough that a surveyor captured an outline rather than a monument. The dimensions are modest, roughly in keeping with a small domestic enclosure, but the north-facing aspect of the slope is a slightly unusual choice, since most comparable sites tend to favour more sheltered or southerly orientations.

There is nothing for a visitor to see here in any conventional sense. The interest lies precisely in that absence, in the fact that the cartographic record preserves the ghost of something the landscape itself has since absorbed completely.

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Pete F
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