Enclosure, Inane, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Inane, Co. Cork

On the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, a circular enclosure is marked clearly enough at Inane in West Cork, complete with the hachured lines surveyors used to indicate a defined earthwork.

Visit today, however, and there is nothing to see. The enclosure has vanished from the ground entirely, leaving no visible surface trace, and in its place sits a small, roughly triangular patch of wet ground, no more than eleven metres across, hemmed in by stone walls about one and a half metres high.

The site sits in marsh on a northeast-facing slope, close to and northeast of a ringfort, the kind of circular enclosed settlement that was widespread across Ireland during the early medieval period. The proximity to the ringfort is unlikely to be coincidental; enclosures of this kind often formed part of a wider pattern of land use around such settlements, serving agricultural or boundary purposes. What the 1842 map recorded was already, presumably, a degraded feature by that point, and whatever earthwork once defined the circle has since been lost to the wet, marshy ground conditions that characterise the slope. The stone walls now enclosing the damp triangular area may represent a later, practical intervention, a farmer managing boggy land rather than any attempt to preserve or echo the earlier feature.

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Pete F
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