Enclosure, Aghern, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Aghern, Co. Cork

In a pasture on an east-facing slope in Aghern, County Cork, there is an archaeological site that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

No bank, no ditch, no visible earthwork of any kind remains. What survives instead is a cartographic ghost: a circular enclosure recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, defined at that time by a wide bank planted with coniferous trees, and now levelled entirely out of the landscape.

Circular enclosures of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval Ireland, where they served variously as farmsteads, burial grounds, or places of assembly. The bank planted with conifers noted on the 1842 map is itself an interesting detail. Trees were frequently used to reinforce earthen banks, and their roots can preserve underlying features even after the visible mound has been ploughed or grazed flat. Whether that is the case here is unknown. What the 1842 map does confirm is that the enclosure was still a recognisable feature in the landscape at the time of the first systematic Ordnance Survey of Ireland, meaning its disappearance is a relatively modern event, the result of agricultural improvement or land clearance sometime in the century and a half since.

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Pete F
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