Enclosure, Ballygrady, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
In a patch of marshy scrubland at Ballygrady in County Cork, there is a fort that exists now only on paper.
The enclosure, which measured roughly fifty metres east to west and forty metres north to south, with an unusual chamfered south-west corner that gave it five sides rather than four, can be traced clearly enough on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937. But at some point between 1974 and 1984, during land reclamation works, it was levelled. No visible surface trace remains today.
What the maps recorded was a structure of some complexity. The 1842 six-inch map shows an outer line of hachures, the cartographic convention for indicating an earthen bank or rampart, enclosing a circular interior defined by a further inner line. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman described the site as a double-ramparted quadrangular fort on the land of Denis O'Sullivan, measuring 48 yards by 43 yards, with the outer rampart already removed and its fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanied such ramparts, already filled in. So even before the reclamation of the 1970s and 1980s finished the job, the site had been losing ground for generations. Bowman also noted a second fort in the vicinity, described as separate from the quadrangular enclosure but apparently entering into its south-west corner, a spatial relationship that suggests the two structures were related in some way, perhaps sequential in date or connected in function. A possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often associated with early medieval settlement sites, was recorded in the north-east quadrant of the main enclosure.
There is nothing to see at Ballygrady now. The site's interest lies entirely in what the historical record preserves: a multi-phase earthwork, already partially dismantled before the twentieth century, finally erased during agricultural improvement works within living memory. The maps, and Bowman's notes, are what remain.