Enclosure, Mullenaboree, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Mullenaboree, Co. Cork

A field in Mullenaboree, County Cork, carries a name that outlasted the structure it once described.

Locals have long called it the "lios field", a lios being an old Irish term for a ringfort or enclosed settlement, typically the remains of an early medieval farmstead surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch. The enclosure itself is gone, levelled at some point and leaving no visible trace on the ground today. What remains is only the name, stubborn and specific, attached to a patch of farmland beside a newer house and yard.

The structure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, drawn in that first great systematic mapping of Ireland. At that time it appeared as a D-shaped enclosure roughly 45 metres in diameter. The D-shape, rather than a full circle, is a recognised variant among Irish enclosures and sometimes reflects the original topography of the site or the practical decisions of whoever built it. By the time it was formally noted in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in 1994, it had already been levelled, leaving the 1842 map as the clearest evidence of its former shape and scale. The proximity to a modern farmyard suggests the land was actively worked and gradually cleared, a fate that came to many such earthworks across the Irish countryside during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There is nothing to see at Mullenaboree now, at least not above ground. The site is of interest less as a place to visit than as a particular kind of archaeological circumstance, where a placename quietly preserves the memory of something that no longer physically exists.

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