Enclosure, Knocknakilla, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
On the lower northern slopes of Musherabeg in County Cork, somewhere beneath a canopy of forestry, there is an earthen enclosure that was found once and then, apparently, lost again.
Recorded in 1995, it could not be relocated just five years later, which gives the site an oddly provisional quality, as though it exists more comfortably in the written record than on the ground.
The enclosure itself is modest in scale, roughly circular and measuring approximately 22 metres by 19.5 metres. It is defined by an earthen bank, the kind of low raised boundary commonly associated with early medieval ringforts or smaller agricultural enclosures, with a fosse, that is, a surrounding ditch, running along its north-eastern and south-south-western arcs to a depth of around half a metre. A drainage channel cuts across the north-western section, which may partly explain why the bank is particularly low there, worn down or disrupted by the movement of water over time. More intriguing is a roughly circular arrangement of paving stones, around five metres across, found just outside the bank to the south-east. This paved area appears to cut across the fosse, suggesting it may have been laid down at a different point in the site's use, either after the ditch had already silted up, or as part of some later activity that had its own relationship with the enclosure boundary.
The 1995 identification was documented by Johnson in 1998, and the dimensions and condition noted at that time represent the fullest picture available. Whether the enclosure's subsequent invisibility in 2000 was a matter of changed ground conditions, dense forestry growth, or the enclosure's own subtlety against the slope, is not recorded. It remains a site that was glimpsed, measured, and described with care, and then quietly slipped back into the hillside.