Enclosure, Monaloo, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Monaloo, Co. Cork

At Monaloo in County Cork, an old enclosure exists primarily as a cartographic ghost.

It appears on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, drawn with enough confidence to suggest it was a legible feature in the landscape at that time, yet today it sits buried within forestry, unseen and unreachable by the casual visitor.

The enclosure is subrectangular in plan, roughly 25 metres along its northeast to southwest axis and around 15 metres across. Subrectangular enclosures of this kind are a familiar, if often underdated, feature of the Irish countryside. They are typically earthen or stone-built boundaries, sometimes the remains of an early medieval farmstead or a ringfort variant, sometimes older still, though without excavation or closer survey it is rarely possible to say with confidence what any one example actually was or when it was built. What the 1842 map tells us is that the feature was visible to the surveyors who crossed this part of Cork nearly two centuries ago, at a moment before commercial forestry had altered so much of the rural midground. The planting that followed, at some point in the intervening decades, effectively sealed it off.

Because the site is currently inaccessible due to forestry, there is little a visitor could do beyond locating it on historical mapping and noting the gap between what was once recorded and what can now be observed.

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Pete F
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