Enclosure, Dromgarriff, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Dromgarriff, Co. Cork

On a west-facing terrace of Cobduff hill, above the wooded inlet of Glengarriff, a ring of upright stone slabs barely breaks the surface of the bog.

The circle is twelve metres across, its boundary formed by contiguous but intermittently spaced slabs, each roughly half a metre thick and standing about sixty centimetres above the ground. They are most visible along the south-eastern to south-western arc, where the sequence is clearest; elsewhere the bog has crept up around them, so that the enclosure announces itself only gradually as you pick out one slab, then another, then realise you are looking at a coherent shape. The level interior is covered in moor-grass, giving nothing obvious away about what once happened inside.

An enclosure of this kind, a defined circular area bounded by upright stonework set into rough hill pasture, is a feature found widely across the Cork uplands, though their precise functions are not always easy to pin down. Some were stock enclosures, others had ritual or funerary associations, and the distinction is not always recoverable from surface evidence alone. What makes the Dromgarriff example quietly interesting is partly its setting, a sheltered terrace on a working hillside with a long view westward, and partly the fact that it does not stand alone. A second enclosure of the same general type lies roughly 140 metres to the south-east, suggesting that whatever activity generated one of these structures here also generated another nearby, within easy sight or walking distance of the first.

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Pete F
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