Enclosure, Mullans, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a west-facing slope somewhere in the Wicklow landscape at Mullans sits an enclosure that has, in a very practical sense, disappeared.
Not destroyed, not excavated, not explained, simply lost beneath a canopy of forestry plantation, its exact location unconfirmed by anyone who has gone looking.
What is known comes from cartographic evidence rather than fieldwork. The site appears as a small circular enclosure on the 1907 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and again on the 1938 edition, where hachures, the fine lines used by surveyors to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, mark its outline. Its maximum diameter was recorded at roughly thirty metres, a modest but not insignificant size. Circular enclosures of this kind in Ireland range widely in date and purpose, from early medieval ringforts used as defended farmsteads to prehistoric ceremonial sites, and without access to the ground, it is impossible to say which category this one belongs to. The Wicklow uplands contain a remarkable density of such features, many of them poorly understood, and this one sits in that larger pattern of quiet, unresolved archaeology.
The forestry that now covers the slope has effectively made the site inaccessible to investigation. It was recorded as impossible to locate during survey work, which places it in an unusual category, known to have existed, mapped twice across three decades of the twentieth century, and yet currently beyond reach. It is the kind of place that exists more fully on paper than on the ground.