Enclosure, Meennaraheeny, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
On a small hill in the townland of Meennaraheeny in north Cork, the outline of an ancient enclosure survives largely as a memory in the landscape.
What was once a defined earthwork, trapezoidal in shape and measuring roughly thirty metres on its longest axis, has been levelled to the point where only two scarps remain to suggest the geometry of the original structure. One of those surviving edges runs for about twenty-two metres along the south-west side; the other, shorter one traces the south-east. Together, they mark out a level interior that was once entirely contained within the enclosure. The northern half of that same interior has since been absorbed into the garden of a modern bungalow.
When Bowman recorded the site in 1934, it was still described as a fort on the summit of a small hill, situated on land belonging to a Mr Murphy. Bowman measured it as an irregular quadrangle with sides of twenty-eight, twenty-six, nineteen, and eighteen yards respectively, which corresponds reasonably closely to the trapezoidal outline shown on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842. The term "fort" in this context almost certainly refers to a ringfort or related enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or polygonal earthwork commonly built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead. The 1842 map depiction places the structure clearly in the landscape before the levelling had progressed as far as it has today, and the comparison between Bowman's measured sides and those earlier cartographic proportions suggests the earthwork was already diminished by the mid-twentieth century, even if still legible as a distinct feature. Its position immediately to the north of a quarry raises the possibility that quarrying activity contributed to the gradual erosion of the site over time.