Enclosure, Ballycurragh, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In the commercial forestry above Ballycurragh, a low bank of earth and stone traces out an almost-rectangle in the hillside, and cartographers have never quite agreed on what shape it is.
The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1838 as a circle; today the same ground appears on maps as an ordinary small field. Neither description fully captures what is actually there, which is an enclosure roughly 40 metres by 35 metres, its bank ranging between one and one-and-a-half metres in height and built with drystone facing on two of its sides, sitting on a south-east-facing slope with a quiet persistence that predates the forestry around it by a considerable margin.
Enclosures of this kind, defined by a continuous bank of earth and stone, appear throughout Ireland and can date anywhere from the early medieval period onward. They were used variously as farmsteads, animal pens, or settlement boundaries, and the details of their construction often carry traces of the logic behind them. At Ballycurragh, that logic is still readable in the ground. On the north-east and south-west sides, the land drops sharply away to a gully just beyond the outer edge of the bank, meaning the builder here made use of natural terrain rather than digging a fosse, the term for a deliberate external ditch, to reinforce the boundary. On the north-east interior, however, a drainage fosse does run inside the bank, suggesting the site had a practical concern with managing water on the slope. The entrance, two metres wide, faces south-east, a common orientation that offers shelter from prevailing westerly weather. No internal features have been identified, so whatever happened inside this enclosure left no obvious surface trace.