Enclosure, Brittas, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
Beneath the level pasture at Brittas in north Cork, the outline of an ancient enclosure survives only on paper.
The site exists now as an absence, a place that registers archaeologically but offers nothing to the eye. No earthwork, no bank, no ditch. Just grass over ground that was once deliberately shaped by people who left no other record here.
What we know comes from an 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded a roughly oval enclosure measuring approximately 32 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. Its southern side was noted as running almost straight, a slight irregularity that hints at something about how it was originally laid out or adapted over time. Enclosures of this kind, typically circular or oval ringforts formed by an earthen bank and external ditch, were a common feature of the early medieval Irish landscape, used variously as farmsteads, livestock enclosures, or defended homesteads. This one was already levelled by the time systematic archaeological recording got underway, meaning the 1842 map captured something that had perhaps been disappearing for generations before that. By the time anyone thought to look closely, there was nothing left to see on the ground.