Enclosure, Moyge, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
For at least 180 years, someone has been calling this field the Round Acre.
The name appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, again in 1905, and again in 1936, each time marking a near-perfect circle of pasture on a slight rise roughly 260 metres north of the Awbeg River in north County Cork. That continuity of name is, in its quiet way, remarkable. The field was mapped, re-mapped, and named by generations of surveyors and farmers who may not have known, or particularly cared, that they were recording something far older than any field boundary they had ever walked.
What sits beneath the grass is an earthen enclosure of the kind commonly associated with early medieval Ireland, though such features can span a wide range of periods and functions. Roughly circular, it measures 91 metres east to west and 88 metres north to south, making it a substantial example of its type. It is defined by an earthen bank, which rises about 0.6 metres on its inner face and 1.15 metres on the outside, and is accompanied by an external fosse, a shallow defensive or boundary ditch, now waterlogged to the north and measuring about 0.35 metres deep. There are four breaks in the bank, at the north-east, south-south-east, south-south-west, and north-west, which may represent original entrances, later gaps, or both. The site does not stand alone in the landscape; a second circular enclosure lies approximately 20 metres to the south-west, and a ring-ditch, a circular earthwork often associated with prehistoric burial, sits around 65 metres in the same direction. Whatever this corner of north Cork was used for in the distant past, it appears to have drawn sustained attention across a long stretch of time.