Enclosure, Ballyellis, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyellis, Co. Cork

In a stretch of marshy pasture in north Cork, a low circular earthwork sits quietly beside a stream few people have heard of, doing nothing to announce itself.

It is barely a bump in the ground, a saucer-shaped raised area roughly fourteen metres across, its outer bank rising less than a metre above the surrounding field. What gives it away, if anything does, is the incongruous cluster of mature deciduous and coniferous trees planted within it, an unlikely little copse in an otherwise open landscape.

The earthwork lies about twenty metres east of the Lougheagle stream, which runs southward to join the Awbeg River. The Awbeg, a tributary of the Blackwater, flows through a part of Cork long associated with early settlement, and enclosures of this kind are a familiar if poorly understood feature of the Irish countryside. The term enclosure covers a broad category of roughly circular earthen monuments, some prehistoric, some early medieval, defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch. They served various purposes across different periods, from settlement enclosures to field boundaries to ceremonial spaces, and the low, saucer-shaped profile of this particular example, with an internal height of just eighteen centimetres and an external height of seventy-six centimetres, suggests it has weathered considerably or was never especially substantial to begin with. The trees planted inside it at some later point add a layer of accidental preservation; roots and shade tend to discourage the kind of casual ploughing that has destroyed so many similar features elsewhere.

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Pete F
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