Enclosure, Lisheen, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisheen, Co. Cork

In a pasture field on a south-facing slope in Lisheen, Co. Cork, there is an enclosure that local people have long called a "fort", though the ground itself is quiet about what it once was.

The field is almost perfectly circular, measuring roughly 62 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west, and it is enclosed by a stone fence that follows that near-symmetrical outline with some purpose. That roundness is the thing. Circular or sub-circular enclosures of this kind appear across Ireland in considerable numbers, and while the word "fort" has stuck in local memory, they are more often understood by archaeologists as the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century.

What survives here beyond the enclosing fence is slight but telling. An arc of bank, no more than 0.2 metres high and running about 18 metres on an east-north-east to west-south-west axis, crosses the interior along a break in the slope. A break in slope is exactly the kind of natural feature a settlement builder would have worked with rather than against, using the change in gradient to manage drainage or define a level platform within the enclosure. The bank itself is low enough that a casual eye might read it as nothing more than a fold in the field, which is perhaps why the site survives at all. Pasture land tends to be gentler on earthworks than tillage, and the stone fence that frames the whole suggests the enclosure boundary has been maintained, in some form, across many centuries of agricultural use.

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