Enclosure, Derroograne, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Derroograne, Co. Cork

On a west-facing slope above Glengarriff Harbour, a small stone enclosure sits in rough hill pasture, half-swallowed by bog.

What makes it odd is not its size, roughly twelve metres across, but the fact that it has two walls, one growing out of the other. The lower, broader courses protrude from the shallow peat and belong to the original structure, an ancient circular enclosure of the kind found across early Ireland. Sitting directly on top of those older stones is a later, narrower wall, more roughly built, that narrows as it rises. Somebody, at some point in the more recent past, recognised a useful ready-made base and simply built upwards, most likely to create a pen for sheep or cattle. The result is a peculiar double-layered structure in which centuries of different intentions are literally stacked on top of one another.

The original enclosure belongs to a wider prehistoric and early medieval tradition of circular stone-walled enclosures used variously for settlement, agricultural, or ritual purposes. Whether this particular one served any of those functions is not recorded, but its setting within a network of field boundaries suggests it was part of a managed agricultural landscape for a very long time. The surrounding context adds further depth. About twenty-six metres to the northwest lies a boulder-burial, a form of megalithic monument in which a large capstone rests directly on a series of smaller boulders, typically associated with the Bronze Age. Roughly seventy metres to the south there is a hut site, the remains of a simple stone-built dwelling. Together, these three features point to a terrace that was inhabited, worked, and marked by the dead across a considerable stretch of human time.

The interior of the enclosure is now completely inaccessible, choked with dense scrub, so there is little to see beyond the walls themselves. Field walls radiate outward from the enclosure to the west, northwest, and southeast, which gives a sense of how central this structure once was to the organisation of the land around it. The boulder-burial to the northwest is worth seeking out as a separate point of interest if the ground allows for it.

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Pete F
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