Enclosure, Kiltoohig, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kiltoohig, Co. Cork

What looks like an ordinary stretch of pasture in Kiltoohig, north County Cork, is quietly more complicated than it appears.

The ground here carries the faded memory of a bivallate enclosure, meaning a roughly oval or subrectangular enclosure defined by two concentric banks and ditches, a form most commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. At roughly 70 metres on its longer axis and 50 metres on the shorter, it would once have been a substantial presence in the landscape, though today all of that has been levelled to the point where only a gentle rise in the field betrays that anything is there at all.

The site's history can be traced, at least in cartographic terms, across three editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. The 1842 map shows it clearly, rendered with hachures indicating a subrectangular bivallate form, with a field boundary running from the north-west to the south-east alongside it. By 1905 the depiction had shifted slightly, describing it as more oval in outline, with an external fosse, a ditch or trench forming part of the enclosure's defences, shown on the northern and eastern sides. The 1936 map records the banks already reading as scarps rather than raised earthworks, a sign that the gradual process of agricultural levelling was well advanced by that point. What remains now, to the south-east of the central rise, is a shallow depression and a low external rise that may represent the last traces of the fosse and outer bank. An insubstantial field boundary still follows the north-west to south-east line noted on the earliest maps, with a drain running along its outer edge.

The slight rise in the pasture is visible on the ground, though easy to overlook without knowing what to look for. The depression to the south-east, where the outer ditch once ran, gives the clearest sense of the enclosure's original scale and layout.

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Pete F
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