Enclosure, Hightown, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
On an east-facing slope near Hightown in County Cork, there is a place that exists almost entirely on paper.
A small circular enclosure, roughly twelve metres across, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, but by the time anyone thought to look for it on the ground, it had already gone. Levelled flat, absorbed into the surrounding pasture, it leaves no visible surface trace whatsoever. The ground gives nothing away.
What the 1842 map captured was likely a remnant of early medieval or prehistoric settlement. Circular enclosures of this kind are often associated with ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were built across Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, though some examples are older. A ringfort typically consisted of a circular area surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch, used to protect a family, their livestock, and their home. The Hightown enclosure was a modest example at twelve metres in diameter, and it did not survive long enough for its purpose to be definitively established. What makes the site quietly interesting is its context: approximately one hundred metres to the northeast and north lie two further sites, a possible ringfort and another circular enclosure, suggesting that this particular hillside may once have been a locus of activity, a small cluster of enclosed spaces whose relationship to one another is now impossible to read from the surface.
