Enclosure, Coonane, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Coonane, Co. Cork

On a south-facing hillside terrace above Glengarriff Harbour, a small D-shaped enclosure sits half-swallowed by shallow bog.

What makes it quietly odd is its western wall: not built at all, but borrowed. A single large boulder, its face running roughly straight for nearly five metres, does the work that a mason might otherwise have done, with a collapsed drystone wall completing the curve around the remaining sides. The whole thing measures just five and a half metres east to west, small enough to feel more like a pen or a sheltered work area than a defended settlement.

Enclosures of this kind, loosely defined as bounded areas delineated by stone walls or earthworks, appear throughout Cork in forms ranging from substantial ringforts to modest field enclosures whose function and date are difficult to establish without excavation. Here, the surviving wall stands only about half a metre high and is roughly sixty centimetres thick, with larger stones visible in the lower course where the structure protrudes from the boggy ground. That the bog has crept up around it suggests some antiquity, though the site has not been excavated and no firm date has been assigned. The position, on a terrace overlooking the valley of the Barony River, would have offered both shelter and a clear view down toward the harbour.

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