Enclosure, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

Beneath a tilled field near Oldcourt in County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across has all but ceased to exist.

It survives now only as a record, caught at a particular moment by the cartographers who produced the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, where it appears as a circular area marked by a dotted line. By the time later editions of the same map series were produced, even that outline had been reduced to a slight curve in a field fence running roughly northwest to southeast. Today there is no visible surface trace whatsoever.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside. They are generally interpreted as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the typical unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. At Oldcourt, whatever once defined the boundary of this particular enclosure, whether bank, ditch, or both, has been levelled entirely by centuries of cultivation. A second circular enclosure sits approximately one hundred and twenty metres to the north, suggesting that this corner of Cork was once a more structured and inhabited landscape than its present agricultural appearance would imply. The 1842 map remains the clearest evidence that anything was ever here at all, preserving in dotted ink a boundary that the ground itself no longer holds.

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