Enclosure, Curragh, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Curragh, Co. Cork

Beneath a field at Curragh in County Cork, the outline of a circular enclosure sits undisturbed in the soil, visible to nobody walking above it but legible to the instruments that swept the ground during a geophysical survey.

The structure is roughly 38 metres in diameter, measured north to south, and appears to have an entrance gap on its south-eastern side, though whether that gap was always intentional or is the result of later disturbance is not yet clear.

The enclosure belongs to a type familiar across the Irish landscape: a roughly circular area defined by a ditch, which in many cases would originally have had an accompanying bank on the inner edge. Such features are broadly associated with early medieval settlement, though they appear across a wide span of Irish prehistory and can serve many purposes, from farmstead enclosure to ritual use. What makes this particular example notable is the manner of its discovery. It came to light not through excavation or aerial photography but through a geophysical survey carried out on behalf of Power Capital Renewable Energy, the kind of pre-development prospecting that increasingly turns up traces of settlement in landscapes that appear, on the surface, entirely unremarkable. The technology typically measures variations in soil resistance or magnetic susceptibility, picking out the fills of ancient ditches that have long since been ploughed flat.

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