Enclosure, Barrees, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Barrees, Co. Cork

On the north-facing rocky slopes of Lackawee, at the northern end of the Slieve Miskish mountains in west Cork, a landscape of low stone walls and circular enclosures spreads across the hillside in a way that resists easy explanation.

What makes this site unusual is not any single feature but the density and variety of what is gathered here: a large outer enclosure roughly 250 metres north to south and 200 metres east to west, filled with smaller enclosures nested within it, a standing stone, a prostrate companion stone, and further structures dotting the slope both to the south and further north. The whole arrangement sits quietly on the hill, largely overlooked.

The large outer enclosure is defined by a low stone bank, half a metre high and a metre wide, and within its interior a scatter of small circular enclosures, ranging from two to nearly eight metres in diameter, clusters around the inner bank face alongside a single small rectangular enclosure. A standing stone in the south-east quadrant of this outer enclosure measures just over a metre in height, its long axis oriented roughly east-north-east to west-south-west; about a metre and a quarter to its north-east lies a prostrate stone, perhaps fallen, perhaps always recumbent. To the south-west of the main enclosure sits a near-circular structure almost fifteen metres across, built from a double line of upright stones set contiguously, with a grass-covered rubble core and a narrow entrance to the south-south-east framed by two upright slabs. About 120 metres further south is a separate oval enclosure, also built with two facing lines of upright stones, its core similarly grass-grown. This technique of double-faced stone walling, where two parallel lines of set stones contain a fill between them, appears in a range of early medieval and prehistoric contexts across Ireland, though the date of these particular structures has not been firmly established. Among all these stone features, only one is earthen: a small circular depression, under two metres across, filled with peaty deposit to a depth of at least a metre and ringed by a low earthen bank, the sole departure from the otherwise entirely lithic character of the site.

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