Enclosure, Castlelohort Demesne, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Castlelohort Demesne, Co. Cork

In the pastureland of the Castlelohort Demesne in north Cork, a low oval earthwork sits on a gentle south-facing slope, close enough to a working farmyard that the two feel almost companionable.

Locals call it a fort, which is the kind of name that gets passed down through generations without anyone needing to inquire too closely into its origins. The designation is not wrong, exactly, though it points toward a past that is considerably older than whatever the word conjures in most imaginations.

The enclosure is roughly oval in plan, stretching about 106 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west, dimensions that place it comfortably within the range of a ringfort or comparable early medieval enclosure. A ringfort, broadly speaking, is a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks, used in Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries as a farmstead or place of status. Here, the defining bank survives along most of its circuit, standing around 0.7 metres on the interior face and slightly more, 0.8 metres, on the exterior. A shallow fosse, essentially a ditch dug to provide material for the bank, runs around the outside and reaches roughly half a metre in depth. There are two breaks in the bank: one to the north, about two metres wide and likely an original entrance, and a more recent gap on the east-south-east side, around three metres across, which has the character of a later convenience rather than an ancient threshold.

The interior has gone largely to scrub and heavy overgrowth, making it inaccessible through most of its extent, with the exception of a narrow strip just inside the bank and a small clearing at the south-east end. The bank itself is thickly overgrown on both faces. The fosse, where the breaks do not interrupt it, survives all the way around. It is the kind of site that reveals itself slowly, and only partially, asking more patience than most visitors typically carry.

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Pete F
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