Enclosure, Raheen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
On a east-facing slope in north Cork, roughly 400 metres north of the River Allow, sits an earthwork that local tradition insists is a place of burial.
The site is known locally as a fort, and that older word carries weight here. The enclosure is pear-shaped, measuring just over 56 metres along its longest axis, and enclosed by an earthen bank rising to about 1.5 metres, stone-faced in places. Inside, the ground is not flat or uniform. The northwest quadrant contains a rectangular raised platform, lifted some 0.7 metres above the rest of the interior and extending roughly 28 metres in length, while the southeast quadrant holds a shallow oval depression. These are not the contours of a simple livestock enclosure.
What makes this site particularly interesting is how it has shifted shape across the historical record. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, the enclosure is depicted as square. By the 1905 revision of the same map series, it appears pear-shaped, and by that point it had been absorbed into the surrounding field fence system, its ancient boundaries repurposed as agricultural boundaries. The change in depicted shape between surveys may reflect cartographic imprecision, or gradual alteration of the bank over the intervening decades, or simply a surveyor taking a closer look. The earthwork also has both an internal fosse and an external fosse, fosse being the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, running in arcs around different sections of the perimeter. A gap of just over two metres breaks the bank to the south-southeast, possibly an original entrance. The structural complexity, the raised interior platform, the ditches, the traditional association with burial, all suggest a site whose original function was more significant than its quiet, grassy present suggests.
