Enclosure, Moneyteige, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a steep north-west-facing slope in the Wicklow foothills, close to Croghan Kinsella, an oval earthwork sits quietly into the hillside, its low grassy banks so worn by time that a walker might cross them without quite registering what they are.
The enclosure measures roughly 38 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 26 metres across, placing it in the range of a small ringfort or early settlement enclosure; a ringfort being a circular or oval area defined by a bank and ditch, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland. The interior slopes downhill from south-east to north-west, following the natural contour of the land, and along the western and north-western edges the original bank has been worn back to little more than a low scarp, between 0.3 and 0.5 metres high. A gap of about 1.7 metres at the south-west may be the original entrance, though centuries of agriculture have complicated the picture considerably; a later stone and earth field fence appears to have cut straight through the north-eastern side of the monument.
What lifts this enclosure out of the ordinary is a find made just five metres to its north-west: a saddle quern, partially exposed and half-buried in the turf. A saddle quern is one of the oldest forms of grain-processing technology known, consisting of a lower stone with a slightly hollowed surface against which a smaller upper stone is worked back and forth to grind cereals. This example is a granite block, roughly 50 centimetres long and 26 centimetres wide, with straight sides and a relatively flat base. Two opposing corners have broken away, and the grinding surface shows a characteristic shallow dish worn into it through repeated use, along with traces of deliberate dressing. The combination of an enclosed settlement site and a grain-processing stone in close proximity points towards a place where people once lived and worked, though whether the quern belongs to the same period of occupation as the enclosure itself remains an open question.