Earthwork, Curraghnalaght, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Curraghnalaght, Co. Cork

Aerial photography occasionally does what ground-level surveying cannot, and at Curraghnalaght in mid-Cork it has preserved the ghost of a feature that would otherwise be almost entirely invisible.

A cropmark, the faint differential growth of crops over buried soil disturbances, reveals what appears to be a double-fossed trackway running in a roughly south-west to north-east direction for around 130 metres. Two closely spaced parallel ditches defined its course, and though no physical trace of them survives above ground, the soil remembers them well enough to leave a mark in a growing field.

The trackway does not exist in isolation. At its south-western end it connects with the site of a levelled ringfort, one of the enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. That ringfort has been substantially destroyed, but its former presence anchors the trackway functionally: this was, most likely, a managed route leading away from a settlement. The north-eastern end of the feature has been truncated by a road, suggesting the landscape has continued to reorganise itself around older boundaries without ever fully erasing them. Two further subcircular enclosures lie to the north-west, one roughly 60 metres away and another about 200 metres distant, hinting at a wider pattern of activity across this part of the parish rather than a single isolated site.

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