Enclosure, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing walls or worn earthworks you can trace with your eye.

This one offers nothing of the sort. In a field above a tributary of the Templebodan river at Oldcourt in County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly fifteen metres across has been ploughed entirely out of existence. The ground gives no hint that anything was ever there.

The site is known only because it was captured, at least in outline, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appeared as a circular area before agricultural improvement erased it altogether. Enclosures of this kind are generally understood to be ringforts, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They typically served as enclosed farmsteads, with a circular bank and ditch protecting a household and its livestock. At fifteen metres in diameter this would have been a modest example. A related enclosure survives about three hundred metres to the east, which at least preserves some sense of the landscape these sites once occupied together, whatever their relationship to one another may have been.

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