Enclosure, Cloghleafin, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
On a hillside in North Cork, near Cloghleafin, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists in any form you could point to.
The ground is pasture, the slope faces east, and there is nothing to see. Yet the place is on record, because in 1842 the Ordnance Survey mapped it, rendering it as a hachured oval on their six-inch sheet, that familiar cartographic shorthand for an earthwork rising above the surrounding ground. The enclosure measured roughly 25 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, which would make it a modest but not insignificant oval earthwork, comparable in scale to the ring-forts or raths that are scattered across the Irish countryside and that typically served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period. At some point between that survey and the present day, it was levelled completely, leaving no visible surface trace.
What makes a vanished site like this worth noting is precisely the gap between the map and the field. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping was a remarkably thorough exercise, and enclosures of this kind were recorded because they were still legible in the landscape, however worn. That it has since disappeared entirely, swallowed by centuries of agricultural activity, is not unusual for Ireland, where a great many earthworks were cleared during periods of intensified land use. What remains is a coordinate, a shape, and a set of approximate dimensions, preserved in the county's archaeological inventory as evidence that something was once there, near the top of a hill in North Cork, organised and enclosed by whoever lived and worked within it.