Enclosure, Curraghawaddra, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Curraghawaddra, Co. Cork

At Curraghawaddra in County Cork, a small circular enclosure roughly ten metres across once sat in the fields east of a nearby ringfort.

It no longer exists in any visible form. The land is pasture now, and there is nothing on the surface to suggest that anything was ever there at all.

What we know of it comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, where it was recorded using hachuring, the fine lines surveyors used to indicate slight earthen banks or raised ground. At that point it was already probably a modest feature, but it was at least legible enough in the landscape for the cartographers to note it. Since then it has been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement over the intervening century and a half. The enclosure's proximity to the ringfort to its east is worth pausing on. Ringforts, roughly circular farmstead enclosures typically dating from the early medieval period, are extremely common across Ireland, and smaller associated enclosures nearby are sometimes interpreted as animal pens, garden plots, or additional domestic spaces connected to the main settlement. Whether that was the function here cannot be said with any certainty, and without excavation the relationship between the two features remains speculative.

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Pete F
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