Enclosure, Fananierin, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Fananierin, Co. Wicklow

On the lower northern slopes of Fananierin Mountain, where rough grazing runs down towards the Drumgoff Brook valley in County Wicklow, a small circular arrangement of stones sits within the angle of a field fence that does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

That absence is itself quietly telling: the fence post-dates the standard mapping of the landscape, yet the stones it corners are almost certainly far older. The enclosure measures only eight metres in diameter, its boundary now reduced to a low, spread scatter of stone roughly one and a half metres wide and just twenty centimetres high, the remains of a wall that was both collapsed and at some point deliberately robbed for building material elsewhere. More stone lies across the interior, adding to the impression of something once deliberate that has been gradually undone by time and convenience.

The site belongs to a cluster of similar features in the area, and its wider significance lies partly in that company. In 1937 a researcher named Price recorded a number of what he described as small rings of stones in this part of Wicklow, a phrase that hints at how casually such things could be logged before systematic survey work brought more rigour to the question of what they actually are. Circular enclosures of this kind, defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, are found across Ireland in various forms and periods; they could represent the remains of a small settlement, a field boundary, or something with a ritual or funerary function. Without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise purpose or date to any individual example, and this one is no exception. What is clear is that it is not alone: several related features have been recorded in the immediate vicinity, suggesting this stretch of the mountain was used in some organised way by people who left behind only these low rings as evidence.

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