Enclosure, Mountbridget, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
There is a field in Mountbridget, County Cork, where a substantial ancient enclosure once stood, and where today there is nothing whatsoever to see.
The ground undulates slightly, the land drops away sharply to the north-east, and pasture covers everything. Whatever was here, it is gone, deliberately erased sometime between 1954 and 1974 according to local memory. That gap of two decades is itself quietly telling: the kind of knowledge that travels by word of mouth rather than paper trail.
The enclosure appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circle roughly 80 metres across, the hachuring indicating an earthen bank or ring. By the time the same area was mapped again in 1905 and 1937, the picture had grown more detailed: the feature was recorded as a bivallate enclosure, meaning it had two concentric banks or walls rather than one, and was slightly oval in shape, measuring around 80 metres east-west and 60 metres north-south, with an external fosse, the ditch that typically ran outside such ringfort-type enclosures. A site of that diameter with doubled ramparts would have been a reasonably substantial one, perhaps the enclosed farmstead of an early medieval family of some local standing. Its proximity to St Bridget's Well, lying roughly 170 metres to the north-east, hints at the kind of clustering of features, secular enclosure alongside sacred water source, that is fairly common across early Irish landscapes, though what the relationship between the two actually was here cannot now be said.
The well survives. The enclosure does not. The field where it stood offers no surface trace, no shadow in the grass after rain, no slight rise that might prompt a second glance.