Enclosure, Egmont, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Egmont, Co. Cork

On a hilltop in Egmont, north County Cork, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in pasture, its double ditches and single causeway entry hinting at a purpose that has never been fully resolved.

The enclosure measures approximately 35 metres across, a modest but deliberate ring cut into the hillcrest, and what makes it quietly odd is the way the landscape seems to have worked against it almost from the start. Quarrying has eaten into the northern side of the interior, and rock outcrops break the surface across much of the eastern half, leaving the enclosed space feeling more excavated than inhabited.

The site was already old enough to be recorded by the time the Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping programme reached this part of Cork in 1842, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of around 40 metres. On the ground, the enclosure is defined by a fosse, a rock-cut or earthen ditch, running around its perimeter at roughly 0.4 metres deep and about 2 metres wide. A second, shallower fosse sits a further 6.6 metres outside the first on the western side, suggesting either a more elaborate original design or a later addition to the circuit. Entry was from the east, across a causeway 4.5 metres wide that bridges the inner ditch. A large quarry immediately to the north-west of the enclosure complicates the picture further, making it difficult to know how much of the surrounding landscape once related to the monument before extraction reshaped it. Enclosures of this kind in Ireland range widely in date and function, from early medieval ringforts used as farmsteads to prehistoric ceremonial sites, and without excavation this one gives little away about which tradition it belongs to.

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Pete F
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