Enclosure, Ballywilliam, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballywilliam, Co. Wexford

At the western edge of a plateau in Ballywilliam, County Wexford, a large circular enclosure lies almost entirely out of sight, legible only from above and only under the right conditions.

The circle measures roughly 55 metres across its northeast to southwest axis, and the feature that defines it is a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch dug into the earth, whose presence is now betrayed by nothing more than a faint shadow in aerial imagery. Part of its perimeter has been absorbed into a field bank along the western and northern sides, meaning the landscape has quietly incorporated and partially disguised it over the centuries.

The enclosure was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and its existence as a coherent feature remains dependent on cropmark evidence, the phenomenon by which buried ditches and banks affect the growth of surface vegetation in ways that become visible from altitude, particularly during dry summers when soil moisture differences are most pronounced. The full outline is only discernible on certain aerial views, and even then only along portions of its arc. This is the kind of site that exists in a peculiar state, present in the ground, mapped on record, yet offering almost nothing to the eye of anyone standing in the field beside it.

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