Enclosure, Ballinvoher, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinvoher, Co. Cork

In the pastureland around Ballinvoher in north County Cork, there is a place recorded on maps for over a century that no longer exists in any form you could see or touch.

A small circular enclosure, roughly fifteen metres across, appeared faithfully on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, again in 1905, and once more in 1935. By around 1960, according to local memory, it had been levelled. Nothing remains on the surface today.

The enclosure itself was the kind of feature that appears across Ireland in considerable numbers, a roughly circular earthwork defined by a raised bank or ditch, most often dating from the early medieval period, though such forms were used across a broad span of prehistory too. At fifteen metres in diameter this was a modest example, on the smaller end of the scale for such monuments. The hachured symbol used on those nineteenth and early twentieth century OS maps indicated sloping earthwork edges, meaning the feature still had measurable relief when the surveyors recorded it. Three successive map editions captured it across nearly a hundred years, and then, within a generation of the last survey, it was gone, absorbed into the working farmland around it.

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Pete F
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