Enclosure, Lisballyhay, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisballyhay, Co. Cork

On the south-western slope of Cashlaunowen, at the western end of the Ballyhoura mountain range in north Cork, there is nothing left to see.

That, in a way, is what makes this place worth a moment's attention. A circular enclosure once stood here, roughly fifteen metres across, ploughed flat long before living memory and leaving no visible trace on the surface of what is now tillage land. Its existence is known only because the cartographers of the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it, using hachured lines, the standard notation of the time for depicting an earthwork in raised or hollow relief, to mark its outline on the hillside.

Small circular enclosures of this kind are scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands, and most are thought to date from the early medieval period, though some are considerably older. They served a range of purposes, from enclosed farmsteads and animal pounds to ceremonial or funerary sites, and their interpretation often depends on what, if anything, survives inside them. Here, that question cannot be answered. By the time any systematic record was made beyond the OS map, the earthwork had already been levelled, most likely by repeated cultivation of the slope. What the 1842 surveyors recorded was itself probably a diminished version of whatever originally stood there. The site now exists only in two dimensions, as an ink outline on an old map and as a grid reference in the archaeological record.

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