Enclosure, Barnagore, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
Beneath an industrial facility in Barnagore, County Cork, lies what was once a circular enclosure, a type of enclosed settlement common throughout early medieval Ireland, now buried under concrete and largely forgotten.
The only record of its existence is a single aerial photograph, taken in July 1989 by Dr D.D.C. Pochin Mould, which revealed the enclosure as a cropmark, the faint discolouration of vegetation above buried archaeology that shows up clearly from the air even when nothing is visible at ground level.
The enclosure appears to have been univallate, meaning it was defined by a single bank or ditch rather than multiple concentric rings. At some point during the 1990s, a phase of construction at the EMC factory was carried out directly over it, apparently without knowledge of what lay beneath. Two further enclosures, recorded separately and situated roughly ninety metres to the south-east, were also built upon during the same period of development. All three sites survive now, if they survive at all, only as buried traces under industrial ground.