Enclosure, Annagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
In a field in Annagh, north County Cork, there is an enclosure that no one can see from the ground.
It exists, for now, only as a cropmark, one of those ghostly impressions that ancient earthworks leave on the surface of a field during dry summers, when the soil above a buried ditch or bank retains moisture differently from the surrounding earth, and growing crops betray the difference in their colour and height. From the air, the shape resolves into something deliberate: a roughly rectangular enclosure about thirty metres across, with three straight sides and one curved side to the south-west.
The geometry is quietly interesting. Subrectangular enclosures of this type, defined by a raised bank and an external fosse, meaning a surrounding ditch dug on the outside of the bank rather than within it, are found across Ireland and are generally associated with the early medieval period, though enclosures of broadly similar form were constructed across many centuries for many purposes, from settlement to burial to stock management. The slight irregularity here, that one curved side interrupting an otherwise angular plan, might reflect a practical adjustment to local topography, or it may simply be the way the thing was built. Without excavation it is difficult to say more. What the aerial photographs confirm is that something was once deliberately enclosed here, defined by earthworks substantial enough to leave a trace in the soil more than a thousand years later.