Enclosure, Knockhowlin, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
In a field at Knockhowlin in County Wexford, there is something that cannot be seen from the ground at all.
A small circular enclosure, roughly twenty metres across, betrays itself only from the air, where its outline appears as a cropmark, the subtle differential in plant growth that occurs above buried features and which, under the right conditions of drought or low sun, photographs can make legible. The buried feature responsible here is a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, that once defined a neat ring in the landscape and has since been absorbed entirely beneath the soil.
Cropmarks of this kind are often the only surviving trace of early enclosed settlements, the type sometimes associated with the ringforts that were built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, though without excavation it is impossible to say precisely what this enclosure was or who made use of it. What the aerial photographs taken in 2006 do confirm is a single-ditched circular plan sitting on fairly level ground, with a small stream running roughly north to south about 175 metres to the east. That proximity to water is unremarkable in itself, but it is consistent with the practical logic of early rural settlement, where a nearby water source was a straightforward necessity rather than an amenity. The site offers no visible monuments, no earthworks a walker would notice, only the ordinary surface of a Wexford field.