Enclosure, Derryclogher, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derryclogher, Co. Cork

What you are looking at, if you happen to find it, is a rough oval of stone barely half a metre high, pushing up through the surface of a bog on a south-facing slope in Derryclogher valley.

The wall is not dramatic. It measures roughly twelve metres north to south, nine metres east to west, and its thickness runs to about sixty-five centimetres. The interior is level ground, mostly, except where the slope rises at the northern end beneath a cover of fern, and it is there that the wall survives best, preserved by the very bog that has swallowed the rest.

Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval stone-walled spaces, are found across Ireland in considerable numbers and represent some of the more quietly puzzling features of the rural landscape. Some were settlements, some animal pens, some may have served functions that archaeologists continue to debate. What makes this particular example worth attention is not the enclosure alone but what surrounds it. Ancient field boundaries run south-west from the wall towards a second enclosure roughly ninety metres away, suggesting that this was once part of a functioning agricultural system, with defined territories and deliberate connections between structures. A third enclosure sits about thirty metres to the north-east. Taken together, the cluster implies that the terrace in Derryclogher valley was once purposefully organised, even if the bog has since reclaimed much of the evidence.

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Pete F
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