Enclosure, Knuttery, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Knuttery, Co. Cork

The best evidence that something once stood at Knuttery in north Cork is a barely perceptible rise in boggy ground, a ghost of a curve that most walkers would step over without a second thought.

What lies beneath, or rather what has been almost entirely erased, is a circular enclosure of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in considerable numbers, serving variously as ringforts, settlement enclosures, or enclosures for livestock. This one measured roughly eighteen metres in diameter, a modest but not insignificant size, and it sat on a west-facing slope in ground that was already marshy when the earliest detailed maps were being made.

The enclosure appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, rendered in the hachured style used to indicate raised or earthen features. By the time anyone thought to look for it on the ground, a field boundary had been driven straight through it along an east-west line, bisecting the circle and rendering it effectively invisible as a coherent form. A drain runs along the length of that field boundary now, and the enclosure itself has been levelled. Only the southern half retains any trace, a semicircular swell in the marsh that becomes apparent only if you are specifically looking for it and know where to stand.

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Pete F
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