Enclosure, Tincurry, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tincurry, Co. Wexford

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or crumbling walls.

Others exist only as a whisper in the soil, invisible to anyone walking the ground but legible from above under the right conditions. The enclosure at Tincurry, County Wexford, belongs firmly to the second category. Its outline, a subcircular area roughly 45 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west, appears only as a faint cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing crops that betrays buried features beneath. It was captured on Google Earth imagery from July 2018, and that aerial view remains the primary evidence for its existence.

A fosse, essentially a ditch dug to define or defend a bounded space, traces the perimeter of the enclosure, though so faintly that it registers more as a suggestion than a feature. Complicating the picture are two relict field drains, channels from an earlier agricultural arrangement, that cut across the site. One runs northwest to southeast and coincides with the western and northern sections of the enclosure's perimeter; the other crosses the interior on a northeast to southwest alignment. Where the enclosure's edge and the drain's course overlap, a large excavated feature around 40 metres by 12 metres is visible, raising questions about how much of what appears in the aerial image is genuinely prehistoric or early medieval in origin and how much has been disturbed or obscured by later land management. The site was first reported by Jean Charles Caillère, and sits on a west-facing slope, a orientation that would have made practical sense for a settlement enclosure, catching afternoon light and offering drainage away from the interior.

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