Enclosure, Lackaduv, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lackaduv, Co. Cork

Near the top of a hill at Lackaduv in County Cork, a near-perfectly circular enclosure sits on a south-east-facing slope, its earthen and stone bank still intact enough to read clearly in the landscape.

The enclosure measures 14.4 metres across in both directions, which is to say it is almost exactly round, a degree of regularity that suggests deliberate design rather than casual boundary-making. What makes it particularly distinctive is the treatment of the bank itself: upright stone slabs are set radially along its top, arranged like the spokes of a wheel viewed from above, giving the structure a formal, almost architectural quality that sets it apart from a simple field boundary.

An enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular area defined by a raised bank of earth and stone, belongs to a category of monument found throughout prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, used variously for habitation, ritual, or stock management depending on the period and the context. The bank here stands about 0.85 metres on its inner face and 0.4 metres on its outer, with a gap of around 8 metres breaking the circuit to the east-north-east, the most likely original entrance. The interior is level and has at some point been planted with coniferous trees, which now mark the site visually even if they obscure some of the finer detail underfoot. Notably, a wedge tomb, one of Ireland's prehistoric burial monument types built by Neolithic or Early Bronze Age communities, lies in the adjoining field to the north-west, raising the possibility that this part of the hillside carried significance across a considerable stretch of time.

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Pete F
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