Enclosure, Butlerstown, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Butlerstown, Co. Cork

In a pasture field near Butlerstown in County Cork lies an archaeological enclosure that has, in the most literal sense, disappeared.

It is not hidden behind undergrowth or tucked below a hedgerow; it is simply gone, levelled so completely that no surface trace remains whatsoever. The only reason we know it existed at all is that it was recorded on every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, those meticulous nineteenth-century surveys that caught the Irish landscape at a moment when earthworks like this were still, just about, legible on the ground.

The enclosure was roughly rectangular in plan, measuring approximately forty metres along its south-west to north-east axis and around twenty-five metres across. Enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, and their purposes varied considerably: some were ringforts or raths, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval families; others served as animal pounds, ceremonial spaces, or the boundaries of early ecclesiastical sites. Without excavation, and without any surviving above-ground evidence, it is impossible to say which category this one belonged to, or when it was in use. What the maps confirm is that it was a recognised feature of the landscape at the time the surveys were carried out, and that at some point between then and now, ploughing or agricultural improvement erased it entirely.

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Pete F
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