Ring-ditch, Ardskeagh, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Ardskeagh, Co. Cork

At Ardskeagh in north Cork, an entire archaeological site exists only as a faint circular shadow in a single aerial photograph.

The site itself has no visible presence on the ground at all. What the camera captured, flying over in July 1989, was a cropmark, the phenomenon by which buried ditches and foundations cause the crops or grasses above them to grow differently, betraying an outline that is otherwise completely invisible to anyone standing in the field.

The cropmark traces a fosse, which is simply a ditch, running in a rough circle roughly fifteen metres in diameter. Enclosures of this kind are generally classed as ring-ditches, and they tend to be associated with prehistoric funerary or ceremonial activity, though the term covers a range of possible origins and functions. At this scale, fifteen metres across, the feature is quite small, suggesting something more intimate than a major ceremonial monument. Whether it ever had an upstanding element, a mound, a bank, a timber structure at its centre, cannot be said from the cropmark alone. The image was recorded as part of a systematic aerial survey of County Cork in the late 1980s, and the site was subsequently included in the published archaeological inventory of north Cork in 2000.

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