Enclosure, Adamstown, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Adamstown, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at this site in Adamstown, County Cork, and that, in its own way, is precisely the point.

A south-facing slope under tillage holds no visible trace of the enclosure that once stood here, no earthwork, no cropmark obvious to a passing eye, nothing to interrupt the ordinary rhythm of a working field. What remains is essentially a record of an absence, a place catalogued not for what survives but for what was deliberately removed.

Two separate traditions attach to this spot, and they do not quite agree with each other. A 1983 source records a rectangular enclosure on what was then Twomey's farm, already described at that point as destroyed. Local tradition, meanwhile, speaks of a circular enclosure, a form more commonly associated with the ringforts that were built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, typically as enclosed farmsteads. That tradition placed its destruction at roughly a hundred years before the record was made, suggesting it was cleared sometime in the late nineteenth century, likely to make way for the kind of productive agricultural land it now is. Whether those two accounts describe the same feature seen differently, or two distinct structures whose histories became entangled in local memory, is impossible to say. Enclosures were often levelled during land improvement schemes, the earthen banks spread and the ditches filled, leaving nothing for the plough to catch on.

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