Enclosure, Lahernathee, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lahernathee, Co. Cork

In the pastureland of Lahernathee, a small oval of earth and stone sits in a gentle east-west hollow, its interior choked with ferns and briars, its purpose quietly unresolved.

The enclosure measures roughly seven metres across at its widest, defined by a low wall that survives to between twenty centimetres and just under a metre in height. What makes it genuinely odd is not the wall itself but what lies inside it: three upright slabs arranged in a loose configuration across the centre of the space, their orientations slightly at odds with one another, and no clear explanation attached to any of them.

The wall is built in a double-skin style, with an intermittent outer facing of large stones, an inner row of contiguous slabs, and an infill of earth and smaller stones packed between them. This kind of construction is found in various forms across Cork and the wider south of Ireland, appearing in everything from field boundaries to the enclosing walls of early settlement sites, though the small scale here sits closer to the latter. The three interior slabs are where the uncertainty deepens. One runs east-west and measures just under two metres in length; a smaller slab meets it at a right angle at its eastern end; a third stands roughly a metre long, about a metre and a half further east, oriented north-south. Whether these formed part of a structure, marked something within the enclosure, or served some other function entirely is not known. A fourth slab is set radially across the southern bank, where the wall is noticeably lower, suggesting this may have been the entrance point.

The site looks west towards Knockomagh, the hill that rises above Lough Hyne near Skibbereen. The enclosure is heavily overgrown, and without clearance the interior slabs are unlikely to be easily visible. The low bank gives the outline of the space more than any dramatic earthwork, and the entrance, if that is what the southern slab marks, would only be apparent to someone walking the perimeter carefully.

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Pete F
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