Enclosure, Toormore By.), Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
In the bogland of Toormore, in the far west of County Cork, there is an enclosure that no longer announces itself.
It cannot be seen from the ground. There is no earthwork, no upstanding wall, no visible outline of any kind. The only record of its shape comes from a map made in 1842, when the Ordnance Survey's six-inch series captured a subcircular platform rising slightly from the surrounding low-lying bog, the kind of gentle elevation that can indicate an ancient enclosed settlement or farmstead, its edges worn down over centuries of waterlogging and peat accumulation.
The 1842 mapping gives a useful point of reference. Subcircular enclosures of this type are a broadly recognised feature of the Irish landscape, often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say what activity took place here or when. What the bog has done since, as it does with so many such sites, is absorb and obscure. Peat growth is slow but relentless, and a platform that was legible to nineteenth-century surveyors can become, within a few generations, entirely invisible to anyone walking the same ground. That appears to be exactly what has happened at Toormore.