Enclosure, Drishane More, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Drishane More, Co. Cork

In a quiet field of level pasture on the Drishane Demesne in mid Cork, the ground gives itself away only subtly: a slight hollow in the earth, a patch of grass a shade darker than its surroundings.

These are the traces of a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across, the kind of feature that most walkers would pass without a second thought, and yet it marks a site old enough and significant enough to have been recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842.

That early map shows the enclosure as a broken line forming a circular area of around forty metres in diameter, with trees planted within it, suggesting that whoever managed the demesne at the time was at least partly aware of its presence and chose to mark it out, if not fully understand it. The enclosure sits approximately five hundred metres to the south-west of Drishane House and its associated castle. Circular enclosures of this kind in Ireland are often the surface remains of ringforts, which were farmsteads enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, typically dating from the early medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to say with certainty what function this particular feature served. What the map and the ground together suggest is a monument that has quietly outlasted the formality of the demesne landscape around it, reduced now to a depression and a change in the colour of the grass.

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Pete F
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