Enclosure, Rossmackowen Commons, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rossmackowen Commons, Co. Cork

On the lower southern slopes of Hungry Hill in west Cork, a near-perfect circle of tumbled stone sits so quietly in the peaty hillside that it could easily be mistaken for a natural feature.

It is roughly nine and a half metres across, its low wall now largely swallowed by sod and scattered into rubble, particularly along the downslope southern edge. What makes it quietly remarkable is the care that went into levelling the interior: the ground inside is raised by about 1.3 metres at the southern side and cut some 0.7 metres into the hillslope at the north, a deliberate act of engineering to produce a flat, usable floor on an otherwise sloping hillside.

Enclosures of this kind, circular or sub-circular stone-walled structures found across Irish upland landscapes, are generally associated with early agricultural or pastoral activity, sometimes functioning as animal pounds or small farmsteads, sometimes as more temporary working spaces. The effort to level the interior here suggests it was intended for regular, practical use rather than as a casual boundary. To the west, small mounds of stones are interpreted as clearance cairns, the accumulated result of someone picking surface rock off the surrounding ground, likely to improve grazing or cultivation. Perhaps the most intriguing detail is the proximity of a fulacht fia roughly fifty metres to the north-west. A fulacht fia is a type of ancient cooking or industrial site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and shattered stone surrounding a trough, and they are found across Ireland in considerable numbers. Whether the enclosure and the fulacht fia were in use at the same time is unknown, but their closeness on this otherwise bare hillside hints at a small, purposeful landscape of activity, now almost entirely absorbed back into the hill.

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Pete F
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