Enclosure, Ballincurrig, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballincurrig, Co. Cork

In the tillage fields of Ballincurrig in north Cork, a circular enclosure roughly thirty-five metres across has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

No bank, no ditch, no earthwork survives to interrupt the surface of the slope. The only reason anyone knows it was there at all is a hachured outline on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where a cartographer recorded what was already, presumably, a fading presence in the landscape.

The map depiction is specific enough to be telling. The enclosure was roughly circular, with one straight side to the east, an irregularity that sometimes indicates a later intrusion or a deliberate boundary alignment. Enclosures of this general type and scale in Cork are most often associated with early medieval settlement, the kind of modest ringfort, defined by an earthen bank and outer fosse, that once organised farmsteads across Ireland in the first millennium. Whether this one fits that pattern cannot be said with confidence, since so little remains. What the 1842 map preserves is essentially a ghost, a shape recorded just in time. The field boundaries that once lay immediately to the north and east of the site have since been removed, and with them went whatever slight definition the enclosure may still have had in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Pete F
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