Earthwork, Ballybrack, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Ballybrack, Co. Cork

In a pasture field on a north-west-facing slope in Ballybrack, County Cork, there is an earthwork that resists easy classification.

It is not a ringfort in the usual sense, not quite a platform, and not obviously a burial monument, yet it combines elements that suggest all three. What gives it its particular character is the way it has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it, its ancient bank now sharing a boundary with an ordinary stone field fence, the two running together as though always meant to be a pair.

The enclosure is sub-oval in plan, measuring roughly fifteen metres north-west to south-east and nearly twenty-two metres east to west. An earthen bank, still standing around 1.4 metres high, defines the southern and south-eastern arc; from there, a stone field fence takes over and completes the circuit. Inside, the ground is largely level, except for a raised strip about five metres wide running along the inner face of the field fence, which may represent a collapsed or redeposited bank. More intriguing still is a low oval mound, fourteen metres long and ten metres wide, that sits against the outer edge of the main bank on the south-west side. Whether this mound is a separate feature, a later addition, or structurally connected to the enclosure is not recorded. By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first large-scale maps of Ireland at six inches to the mile, the site was already represented as a triangular area marked with hachures, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthen slope or bank, suggesting it had long been a visible feature in the field.

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Pete F
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