Enclosure, Glashaboy, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glashaboy, Co. Cork

On an east-facing slope in north County Cork, a roughly square enclosure once measured approximately 30 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, its western side curving slightly outward in a gentle convex arc.

It no longer exists. According to local information, it was levelled around 1980, and today there is no visible surface trace of anything at all. The ground gives nothing away.

What makes the site's disappearance feel particularly pointed is how long it had been legible. The enclosure appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, rendered with hachures, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature. It appeared again, at least in part, on the 1904 and 1938 revisions of the same map series, its eastern, southern, and western sides still discernible. An aerial photograph taken in July 1973 caught linear banks to the east, south, and west, suggesting the earthwork was still substantially intact less than a decade before it vanished. It had survived in the landscape for long enough to be mapped three times across nearly a century, only to be gone within a single farming generation. The enclosure sat in a ploughed field commanding an extensive view to the northeast and southeast, the kind of position that tends to reward some deliberate choice of location. Roughly 15 metres to the east, in the same field, lie two fulachtaí fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically associated with the Bronze Age, consisting of a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough that would have been filled with water and heated by dropping in stones from a fire. Their presence alongside the enclosure hints at a long pattern of activity in this particular spot, though the precise relationship between the features is unknown. Most of the surrounding field boundaries have also been removed, so the wider landscape in which all of this once made sense has been progressively erased as well.

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Pete F
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