Enclosure, Haggard, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
Some ancient sites announce themselves with standing stones or crumbling walls.
Others exist only as rumours in the soil, legible to cameras mounted on aircraft but otherwise invisible to anyone walking past. In the townland of Haggard in County Wexford, a small circular enclosure of roughly fifteen metres in diameter falls firmly into the second category. Its presence is known only from a faint cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing vegetation that reveals buried features when photographed from above under the right conditions of drought or low sun.
Cropmarks form when buried ditches or banks affect the moisture available to crops or grass overhead, producing differences in colour or growth rate that are undetectable at ground level but can become clear from the air. The circle at Haggard is defined by what is described as a slight feature, suggesting a shallow or partially silted ditch rather than anything substantial. The surrounding landscape is fairly level and low-lying, the sort of terrain that has been farmed continuously for centuries, gradually smoothing away whatever earthworks once broke its surface. Sitting around twenty metres to the north-east is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area bounded by an earthen bank and ditch. Whether the enclosure and the ringfort were ever related in function or period is unknown, but the proximity is suggestive.