Enclosure, Prohust, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Prohust, Co. Cork

There is nothing left to see at Prohust, in north County Cork, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.

Roughly two hundred metres north-east of Prohust House, in ordinary pasture, the ground shows no trace of what the maps record: a square enclosure, noted as far back as the first Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping of 1842, and still carefully marked, with hachuring to indicate its raised edges, on subsequent editions in 1905 and 1937. By the time the 1937 map was drawn, a small mound had also been recorded within its interior. At some point after that, the whole thing was levelled. The land absorbed it.

Square or rectilinear enclosures of this kind are relatively uncommon in the Irish archaeological record, where circular forms, associated with ringforts and early medieval settlement, are far more typical. A square enclosure might point to any number of origins, from early ecclesiastical use to later medieval activity, and the interior mound noted in 1937 suggests there was once something structurally distinct at the centre, though what it was remains unrecorded. What the successive OS maps do show, usefully, is a site that survived intact through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, watched over by cartographers who dutifully inked it in across three separate surveys, before finally disappearing from the landscape altogether.

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