Enclosure, Moneycross, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Moneycross, Co. Wexford

In the low-lying farmland of Moneycross in County Wexford, there is an ancient enclosure that no one walking the fields would ever see.

It exists, at least to modern eyes, only as a cropmark, a faint but legible trace written into the colour and growth of whatever happens to be growing above it. Cropmarks appear when buried features such as ditches or banks affect the moisture available to surface vegetation, causing subtle differences in crop height or tone that become readable from the air, particularly during dry spells in summer. In this case, the mark describes a D-shaped area roughly thirty metres across in both directions, defined by a fosse, that is, a ditch, with notably straighter edges along its north-west and south-west sides. That slight geometric regularity, departing from the more rounded form you might expect, is one of the things that makes it worth a second look.

The enclosure was first reported by Simon Dowling, who spotted it on Google Earth imagery captured in July 2018. The southern edge of the perimeter is partially cut across by a later field bank running roughly west-north-west to east-south-east, suggesting the landscape has been reorganised around it at some point, with the older feature surviving only as a ghost beneath the soil. The site sits in gently undulating terrain, the kind of unassuming agricultural ground that has a way of quietly accumulating the traces of earlier occupation without advertising them. What the enclosure was originally used for, and when it was constructed, is not known from the available evidence; enclosures of broadly this form and scale in Ireland span a considerable range of periods and functions, from early medieval ringfort-related activity to prehistoric settlement and beyond.

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Pete F
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