Enclosure, Goreyhill, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Goreyhill, Co. Wexford

On the eastern slope of Gorey Hill in County Wexford, a circular enclosure lies mostly invisible to anyone walking the ground above it.

No earthwork survives in any obvious form, no ring of stones, no obvious hollow. Its existence was confirmed not by excavation or fieldwork but by a cropmark, the faint ghosting effect produced when buried ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above them to grow in subtly distinct patterns that become legible only from the air or, in this case, from satellite imagery.

The enclosure was first reported by Jean Charles Caillere, and its outline, roughly 39 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south, is defined by a single fosse, a ditch marking the perimeter, running from the south-west around through the north to the south-east. What makes this site particularly elusive is that the cropmark is visible only on Apple Maps imagery from 2018; it does not appear clearly in other aerial sources. The perimeter has not vanished entirely from the landscape, however. Part of it has been absorbed into an existing field bank on the south-east to south-west side, and a slight but telling kink in a north-east to south-west field bank nearby suggests that older boundaries have quietly shaped the modern ones. A second enclosure, recorded separately, sits approximately 110 metres to the north-east, hinting that this part of the hill was once a more densely organised space than its present agricultural appearance suggests.

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Pete F
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