Enclosure, Two-Pot-House, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Enclosures
In a field near the townland of Two-Pot-House in North Cork, a circle drawn in the earth by long-vanished hands becomes briefly legible only from the air.
The site is known from a single aerial photograph, taken in July 1970, which shows a cropmark tracing the fosse of a roughly circular enclosure approximately 35 metres in diameter. A fosse is simply a ditch, usually dug around a settlement or ceremonial space, and here its outline survives not as any visible earthwork but as a difference in the way crops grow above disturbed or compacted soil, a phenomenon that shows up clearly on film when conditions are right but leaves no obvious trace at ground level.
What makes the location quietly interesting is not the enclosure alone but its company. A second circular enclosure lies roughly 60 metres to the north-north-west, and a ring-ditch sits only about 10 metres to the north. Ring-ditches are circular earthworks often associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity, sometimes the eroded remnants of Bronze Age burial mounds. The clustering of these features suggests this corner of North Cork was a place of some significance across a long stretch of prehistory, though exactly when the Two-Pot-House enclosure was in use, and for what purpose, remains unknown. Without excavation, aerial cropmarks can indicate where archaeology lies but cannot say much about who left it or why.
