Enclosure, Ballyshurdane, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyshurdane, Co. Cork

In a pasture field on a gently sloping hillside in north Cork, a low circular platform sits inside a wide ditch, which is itself enclosed within a broader oval bank.

Nothing about it announces itself dramatically; the whole thing is grass-covered and quietly sunk into the landscape. What makes it worth a second look is its layered geometry: a raised central disc, a surrounding fosse or ditch roughly ten and a half metres wide, and then a larger outer bank enclosing an area of around sixty metres across. Just outside the ditch to the north-east, a single stone stands upright, roughly half a metre tall, oriented approximately east to west. Its purpose is unrecorded.

The site belongs to a category of monument broadly described as an enclosure, a term that covers a wide range of prehistoric and early medieval earthworks defined by banks, ditches, or both, and used for everything from settlement to ceremony to stock management. The platform at the centre measures about twenty-two metres north to south and nineteen metres east to west, raised around half a metre above the surrounding ground. The fosse that rings it still holds water in its south-western arc, which suggests the earthworks have managed to retain something of their original profile despite centuries of agricultural use. A slight causeway crosses the ditch on the southern side, which would have served as the main point of entry onto the platform. The outer bank, standing about a metre and a half in external height, has breaks to the north-east and south, roughly corresponding with that causeway crossing. The concentric arrangement of the ditch and the outer bank running from north-west to south-east gives the whole enclosure an oval rather than truly circular plan at the wider scale.

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Pete F
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