Enclosure, Na Doirí, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Na Doirí, Co. Cork

On a north-facing slope in the townland of Na Doirí, in the mid-Cork countryside, a low oval ring of dry-stone walling sits quietly in rough grazing land.

It is not especially large, measuring around twenty metres east to west and sixteen metres north to south, and it makes no great claim on the landscape. What makes it quietly interesting is its persistence: the same enclosure was already being mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842, recorded there as a roughly circular feature some twenty metres in diameter, drawn with the hachured markings that cartographers of the period used to suggest earthworks and enclosed spaces.

Enclosures of this type are scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers, and their purposes vary widely. Some were used to pen livestock, others surrounded early medieval settlements or religious sites, and some remain genuinely ambiguous. The wall here is built in a random dry-stone fashion, meaning the stones are laid without mortar and without any particularly regular coursing, a technique that is ancient but also timeless enough to make precise dating difficult without excavation. The interior is largely level, interrupted here and there by natural rock outcrop pushing through the ground. In the north-eastern corner there is a small irregular area, roughly 1.7 metres long and 0.6 metres wide, enclosed by loose rubble. Whether this is a later addition, a structural feature of the original enclosure, or simply the result of stone collapse is not recorded.

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Pete F
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