Enclosure, Farranastig, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Farranastig, Co. Cork

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or crumbling walls.

This one in Farranastig, a townland in County Cork, announces itself with nothing at all. A rectangular earthwork enclosure, roughly 35 metres east to west and 15 metres north to south, once occupied a south-facing slope here, its banks clearly visible enough to be mapped with hachure marks, the small lines cartographers use to indicate an earthen edge or raised feature, on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842. By 1904, when the next comparable survey came around, the eastern bank had already been removed. At some point after that, the rest followed. Today the ground is level pasture with no visible trace of what stood there.

The enclosure's original function is not recorded. Rectangular enclosures of this kind in Ireland vary widely in date and purpose, ranging from early medieval farmsteads to later field boundaries with a more ceremonial or defensive origin, and without excavation it is impossible to say which category this one belonged to. What is clear is the speed of its disappearance once the process began. The removal of the eastern bank between 1842 and 1904 was likely agricultural, the enclosure's earthworks inconvenient for whoever was working that particular stretch of slope. The surrounding field fences have since been removed as well, leaving no physical landmark to orient a visitor, or even to suggest that the land here was once arranged quite differently.

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Pete F
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