Enclosure, Coole, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Coole, Co. Cork

There is a field in Coole, County Cork, where an ancient enclosure once stood, and where nothing whatsoever now remains.

No earthwork, no ridge, no shadow in the grass at evening. The site exists today only as a cartographic memory, preserved in the detailed hachure lines of a nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map and in the archaeological record that followed it.

When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch mapping of Ireland in 1842, the enclosure was still sufficiently intact to be recorded: a roughly rectangular earthwork measuring approximately forty metres north to south and twenty-five metres east to west, set on an east-facing slope in what is now pasture. Rectangular enclosures of this kind are relatively common in the Irish landscape and tend to represent settlement or agricultural activity from the early medieval period onwards, though without excavation the precise date and function of any individual example remains uncertain. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its maps in 1904, the eastern bank had already been removed. At some point after that, the rest followed. The levelling was complete, and the site left no visible surface trace.

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Pete F
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