Enclosure, Lavally, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
On the western shoulder of Moynass mountain in north Cork, buried in scrub land on a steep north-facing slope, there is a circular enclosure that nobody can quite explain.
It looks, at first reading, like a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. It has the right general shape, the earthen bank, the external fosse or ditch, even some stone facing preserved on the outer face of the bank to the north, south-east, and south-west. But something is wrong with the picture. There is no entrance. And no one, as far as the archaeological record shows, has ever satisfactorily explained why anyone would build such a structure here, on an exposed mountainside where the interior itself slopes steeply downward to the north.
The enclosure measures roughly 21 metres east to west and just over 19 metres north to south. The earthen bank rises about 0.8 metres on its inner face and a metre on the outer, with a fosse running around the north-east to north-north-west arc that reaches about 0.6 metres in depth. On the downslope side, where a ditch would be structurally awkward, the fosse gives way to a terrace roughly two metres wide, a practical concession to the gradient. Stones are scattered across the bank, the ditch, and the interior, some of them remnants of deliberate facing work rather than simple field clearance. The whole arrangement is coherent enough to be clearly intentional, yet the combination of its mountain-shoulder location and the missing entrance puts it outside the normal categories. Its date is unknown, and no firm function has been proposed.