Enclosure, Bohergoy, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Enclosures
Somewhere beneath a stretch of well-drained Kildare pasture lies a site that has not been visible to the naked eye since at least 1985, and perhaps for much longer. What gives it away is not any upstanding earthwork or stony outline, but a cropmark, the faint differential growth in a field's vegetation that reveals buried features beneath the soil when seen from the air.
The enclosure at Bohergoy came to light through an aerial photograph, reference GSI N 348-9, which shows the cropmark of a small penannular enclosure, a ring-shaped feature with a deliberate break in its circuit, open towards the south-west. Penannular enclosures of this kind are relatively common in the Irish landscape and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. What the photograph preserves is essentially a ghost, the outline of a boundary ditch or bank that has long since been ploughed or weathered flat, surviving only as a pattern in the crops above it. By the time anyone checked the field on foot in 1985, there was nothing to see at ground level.
That near-invisibility is part of what makes sites like this quietly compelling. The landscape around Bohergoy reads as ordinary agricultural land, gently rolling and well-drained, with no obvious indication that it holds anything of archaeological interest. The enclosure exists now almost entirely as a photograph of a photograph, a record of a moment when light and crop stress and the right growing season conspired to make something ancient briefly legible again.