Enclosure, Knocknagoun, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Knocknagoun, Co. Cork

On the 1940 Ordnance Survey six-inch map of Mid Cork, a circular feature at Knocknagoun is marked with the label 'Stone Circle', which sounds definitive enough.

It is not. What the map actually records is a low bank enclosing an area roughly 30 metres across, defined partly by a field fence running from north-north-east to south-south-east, and partly by a hachured arc completing the circuit to the north. Hachuring on old OS maps typically indicates a raised or sloped earthwork, so something was clearly there. But whether that something is a prehistoric stone circle, an enclosure of a different kind entirely, or simply a field boundary that happened to take a circular course, nobody has been able to say with certainty.

The site was examined by Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued it in 1984 with the cautious note that its nature was uncertain, the low bank being the only visible feature. That ambiguity was never resolved, because by the time more systematic survey work was being carried out in the region, forestry had been planted across the area and the feature could no longer be located on the ground. It sits in that peculiar limbo occupied by a number of Irish archaeological sites: formally recorded, mapped, named, and yet effectively lost, at least for the time being, beneath a canopy of commercial timber planting.

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