Enclosure, Footstown Great, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Footstown Great, Co. Meath

A curious feature of this site in Footstown Great is that it exists in two versions of reality simultaneously: the one you can walk across, and the one that only becomes legible from the air.

Three small grass-covered enclosures sit in a gentle NE-SW row at the bottom of a south-east-facing slope in the valley floor of County Meath, partially defined by an old stream-bed that skirts their western and northern edges. That stream-bed appears on no map, yet it shows up with reasonable clarity on aerial photographs taken from the 1970s onwards, tracing a ghost geography that ground-level inspection alone would struggle to piece together.

The enclosures are modest in scale but varied in form. The north-easternmost is roughly D-shaped, measuring about 29 metres along its longer axis, with the flat side of the D facing north-east, where a relict field drain has clipped the edge of the monument. It is bounded to the south-west by a fosse, the term for a ditch used in early Irish and medieval earthwork construction, that is still readable in the ground though considerably silted: about seven metres wide at the top, narrowing to three at the base, and dropping roughly half a metre internally. No original entrance into this enclosure has been identified, which is itself an odd detail, since access must have been managed somehow. Immediately south-west of it sits a raised, roughly rectangular platform, about 18 by 13 metres, separated from the D-shaped enclosure by a shallow drain or fosse. Beyond that again is a third subrectangular enclosure, smaller at around 15 by 14 metres, whose boundary appears to follow or incorporate the old meandering stream-bed along its north-west sides. The overall arrangement, three enclosed spaces stepping down a gentle valley slope, suggests a degree of planning, though what purpose the complex served, whether agricultural, domestic, or something else entirely, remains unresolved.

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