Enclosure, Ballynoe, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynoe, Co. Cork

At Ballynoe in County Cork, a set of old earthworks sits quietly in a tillage field, doing double duty as a farm boundary.

What looks at first like an ordinary field fence along the north and east sides is in fact the surviving remnant of an ancient enclosure, its earthen bank still standing to a height of 1.6 metres. A drain running along the eastern edge follows the line of what was once an external fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have surrounded the whole structure. The enclosure belongs to a class of monument known in Irish as a lios, a roughly circular or rectangular earthwork enclosure that typically dates from the early medieval period, though many were used, modified, and absorbed into the farming landscape across many subsequent centuries.

The site is rectangular in plan, measuring roughly 50 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south, and it sits at the base of a south-facing slope. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1902, and 1933 all show it as a field boundary, suggesting it was already thoroughly embedded in the working landscape by the time systematic surveying began. A local account from 1918, by a writer named O'Leary, described it as being on Mrs Coleman's farm, with a rampart then standing six or seven feet high and enclosing about half an acre. That description puts the bank at roughly the height it retains today, which is a reasonable indication that no great collapse has occurred in the intervening century, even as ploughing continued around it.

The enclosure is in active agricultural land, so access is limited to what can be observed from the field margins. The northern and eastern banks are the most intact stretches, incorporated as they are into the existing field fence system, which has likely helped preserve them from further disturbance. The eastern drain, following the course of the old fosse, is the clearest indicator that the original enclosure was once a more complete and deliberate earthwork rather than a natural feature of the slope.

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