Enclosure, Ardglass, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
At Ardglass in north County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across exists almost entirely as an absence.
There is no wall to visit, no earthwork to climb, and no visible monument to photograph. What survives is a cropmark, the faint differential in grass or grain colour that appears from the air when buried ditches affect the growth of plants above them, revealing ancient features that have otherwise vanished from the surface entirely.
The enclosure was recorded in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989, part of a systematic survey of Cork from the air. What the photograph shows is the cropmark of a fosse, the ditch that would once have surrounded a roughly circular enclosure of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though the date of this particular example is not established. A faint secondary cropmark within the eastern half of the enclosure may indicate an internal division, suggesting the interior was not a single undifferentiated space. The site does not stand alone in the landscape. A field system lies immediately to the north-east, and approximately ninety metres to the south-south-west there is a ring-ditch, a separate circular feature of its own, perhaps the remains of a prehistoric burial monument. The cluster of these features across a relatively small area points to a landscape that was organised and used across many centuries, even if none of it is legible at ground level today.