Enclosure, Arduslough, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Arduslough, Co. Cork

On a south-east-facing slope above Crookhaven, in the rough pasture of a field corner, something small and quietly anomalous sits among the briars and gorse.

It is not a wall in any obvious sense, and it is not a ruin in the way visitors usually expect ruins to look. What survives is an enclosure of roughly twelve metres in diameter, its shape somewhere between a circle and a triangle, defined partly by a low scarp, a raised earthen edge revetted with stones, and partly by the straight lines of older field boundaries that seem to have been absorbed into whatever this structure once was.

The scarp runs in an arc from east to west-south-west and rises to about 0.7 metres at its highest. The stones facing it are set at irregular intervals, some of them leaning outward, which may reflect the slow pressure of the earth behind them over centuries, or simply the indifference of whoever originally placed them. At the south-east end, two stones are set radially, meaning they project outward from the arc rather than running along it, and this arrangement is consistent with an original entrance. Enclosures of this kind, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural use, are scattered across the Irish countryside, often surviving only in the margins of fields where later farming never quite reached. Here, the field boundaries themselves seem to have preserved the site by accident, folding it into the working landscape rather than erasing it.

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Pete F
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