Enclosure, Cloghboola, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloghboola, Co. Cork

In the flat marsh land of Cloghboola in north Cork, a slight rise in the ground is almost all that remains of what was once a clearly defined circular enclosure.

The rise measures roughly 7.6 metres east to west and 7.5 metres north to south, barely enough to catch the eye, and only a low scarp some 0.3 metres high traces its outer edge. Along the northern side, a faint internal lip, just 0.15 metres high, hints at what the structure once looked like before the ground was levelled and grazing cattle wore the edges down.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the feature as a hachured circular enclosure, the hachure marks indicating an earthwork of some definition, with a diameter of around ten metres. Circular earthwork enclosures of this kind are relatively common in the Irish landscape, and they vary considerably in date and purpose, ranging from early medieval ringforts used as defended farmsteads to smaller enclosures of uncertain function. By the time this one was mapped in 1842 it was already a diminished thing, and subsequent agricultural activity has reduced it further still, so that what a person sees today is essentially a ghost of the original form, its geometry legible only because the marshy ground around it has preserved even this modest difference in elevation.

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