Enclosure, Stranahely, Co. Wicklow

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Stranahely, Co. Wicklow

On the lower slopes of Lobawn mountain in County Wicklow, a roughly quadrangular enclosure of about a hundred metres by a hundred metres sits quietly beneath dense forest, largely unreachable and largely unexamined.

What makes it peculiar is not its shape or size but its name. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, marks this spot as the "Site of Cavanagh's Camp", and in doing so preserves a fragment of memory that the trees have otherwise done their best to bury.

The Cavanagh in question almost certainly refers to one of the Kavanagh family, the Gaelic lords whose name threads through the history of County Wicklow and south Leinster for centuries. Wicklow's upland terrain, including the slopes around Lobawn, served repeatedly as refuge and stronghold during periods of conflict, particularly in the centuries of resistance to English administration. The first edition OS map, surveyed in the 1830s and 1840s, was compiled at a time when local place-name traditions were still alive enough to be recorded, even when the physical features they described had long since ceased to be legible on the ground. That the cartographers noted "camp" rather than "fort" or "rath" suggests the tradition attached to this site was one of military encampment rather than a prehistoric or early medieval earthwork, though the two sometimes overlapped in popular memory. The enclosure itself faces south-east on a marked slope, a practical orientation for any defended or sheltered position.

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Pete F
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