Enclosure, Ballinvinny, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinvinny, Co. Cork

On a north-facing ridge at Ballinvinny in County Cork, there is a site that exists now almost entirely on paper.

A small circular enclosure, roughly ten metres across, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, but the ground today gives nothing away. The pasture rolls on, unmarked, and no surface trace of the structure survives.

The site belongs to a category of monument sometimes called a lios, the Irish term for a ringfort or enclosed homestead, typically a circular area bounded by an earthen bank and ditch that would once have served as a defended farmstead, most commonly during the early medieval period. Its disappearance is not remarkable in isolation, but what gives this particular loss some weight is a remark made by the antiquarian P. Power in 1923. Writing about this corner of Cork, he noted that the Ordnance Memoir records no fewer than six such enclosures in the area, and that all but two had already vanished by his time. This one is among the casualties. What is quietly striking is that even by the mid-nineteenth century, when the surveyors passed through, the enclosure was apparently already reduced enough to merit only a cartographic note rather than a detailed description. The ridge at Ballinvinny once held a cluster of these sites; now the cluster itself is mostly a matter of old maps and older scholarship. Two related monuments survive nearby, a circular enclosure roughly 200 metres to the north-east, and a levelled ringfort about 220 metres to the south-east, both of which share the same gradual fate of erasure, one of them already gone at ground level.

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