Enclosure, Island, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
In a pasture on a south-facing slope in the townland of Island, County Cork, a nearly perfect circle of raised earth sits quietly in the grass.
The enclosure measures roughly twelve metres across internally, defined by an earthen bank that rises only about thirty centimetres on the inside but reaches seventy-five centimetres on its outer face, giving it the low, rounded profile typical of a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. These structures, sometimes called raths, were generally built between around 500 and 1000 AD as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and any accompanying ditch serving as much as a mark of status and a barrier against livestock straying as a genuine defensive wall.
What gives this particular example a quietly odd detail is a single large upright stone set into the outer face of the bank on the north-east side. It stands about ninety centimetres tall and is only ten centimetres thick, firmly planted at its base but noticeably tilted outward at the top. The cause is mundane but nicely visible: a hawthorn bush has grown up directly behind it over the years, its trunk slowly pushing the stone away from vertical. Hawthorn is a tree with deep roots in Irish folklore, long associated with fairy forts and liminal places, so there is a certain irony in one having physically altered the monument it supposedly protects. The northern side of the bank is largely obscured by heavy overgrowth, meaning the full circuit of the earthwork is easier to read from some angles than others.