Enclosure, Mogeely, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Mogeely, Co. Cork

In a tilled field on a south-facing slope outside Mogeely in east Cork, an ancient enclosure exists almost entirely out of sight.

There is nothing to see at ground level; the site reveals itself only from the air, as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression left when buried archaeological features cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, betraying their outlines to an observer looking down from altitude.

What the aerial photography captured is a bivallate circular enclosure, meaning one defined by two concentric ditches or banks rather than one, with a roughly rectangular annexe attached to its north-western side. This type of enclosed settlement was common in early medieval Ireland, though examples with annexes are less straightforward to interpret; the added enclosure may have served a separate functional purpose, perhaps for livestock or storage, separate from the main domestic space within. The photographs, taken by Dr D. D. C. Pochin Mould, also suggest the possibility of internal features within the main circle, though their nature cannot be determined from cropmark evidence alone. The site does not stand in isolation: another irregular enclosure sits a short distance to the east, and linear features are also visible within the same field, hinting that the landscape here carries several overlapping phases of use and activity, most of it still unexcavated and unnamed.

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