Enclosure, Ringknock, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
Stand in the pasture at Ringknock in County Wexford and you would see nothing unusual beneath your feet.
The ground is level, the grass unremarkable. Yet from the air, a circular enclosure roughly eighteen metres across emerges as a cropmark, that tell-tale phenomenon where buried archaeology causes the vegetation above it to grow differently, revealing outlines invisible to anyone standing at ground level. The enclosure exists, in a very real sense, only when viewed from above.
What makes this site particularly interesting is its relationship to its neighbours. The circular enclosure appears to be attached to a ring-ditch lying just to its north-east, with a separate enclosure site roughly fifteen metres to its west. A ring-ditch is typically the surviving trace of a prehistoric burial monument, often a round barrow whose raised mound has long since been ploughed or weathered flat, leaving only the surrounding ditch as a faint signature in the soil. The clustering of these features suggests this corner of Wexford preserves a small complex of related prehistoric activity, the kind of landscape detail that only becomes legible when aerial photography is brought to bear on otherwise featureless farmland.