Enclosure, Clooncogaile, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Clooncogaile, Co. Waterford

Somewhere in the pastureland of Clooncogaile, a circular enclosure roughly sixty metres across sits in almost complete silence, invisible to anyone standing on the ground above it. No earthwork rises from the soil, no ring of stones breaks the grass. The only record of its physical outline comes from a faint marking on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where a cartographer noted something large enough to be worth recording but already, it seems, barely legible in the landscape even then.

Enclosures of this general type, essentially a bounded circular or oval area defined by a ditch, bank, or wall, appear throughout Ireland in a wide range of periods and functions, from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric ceremonial sites. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say which category a given example belongs to, and Clooncogaile offers nothing on the surface to narrow the question. What is known is that by the time the first systematic Ordnance Survey mapping was carried out in the 1830s and 1840s, the enclosure had already lost enough definition to appear only faintly, suggesting that whatever originally gave it form, whether a raised bank or a ditched boundary, had been substantially reduced by that point. Its diameter of approximately sixty metres would place it at the larger end of enclosed sites, though without further investigation that figure alone says little about its age or purpose.

The site sits on a slight north-facing slope in what is now pasture, and it is not visible at ground level. Aerial photography or geophysical survey would be the only practical means of seeing its outline today.

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Pete F
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