Enclosure, Currymount, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Currymount, Co. Cork

A low earthwork sitting in pasture on a south-west-facing slope at Currymount, County Cork, does not announce itself dramatically.

What survives is an oval area roughly twenty metres east to west and seventeen and a half metres north to south, enclosed by a modest bank that rises only about ten centimetres above the interior ground level but stands up to seventy centimetres on the outer face. That difference in height on either side is one of the small signals that this is a genuine prehistoric or early medieval enclosure rather than a quirk of the landscape, the outer face having been built up or the interior levelled to create the slight platform effect typical of such earthworks.

The site was clear enough to be captured on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure of approximately twenty metres in diameter, the hachuring being the mapmakers' standard method for indicating a raised or defined boundary feature. What the map could not show, and what the ground itself reveals, is a low narrow ridge running north to south through the interior, bisecting the enclosed space and continuing outward over the bank, though it stops there and does not extend into the surrounding field. Whether this internal feature was structural, a later agricultural division, or something else entirely is not recorded. A standing stone lies in the same field roughly a hundred and fifty metres to the south-east. The pairing of an enclosure and a standing stone in close proximity is not unusual in the Irish archaeological landscape, and it raises the possibility that both features relate to the same period of activity, though the connection remains unconfirmed.

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