Enclosure, Ballinastraw, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
On a gently south-east-facing slope in County Wexford, a circular enclosure sits almost entirely out of sight, readable only from above and only under the right conditions.
The earthwork itself has largely vanished into the farmland, but the ground still holds the memory of it, expressed as a cropmark, a ghostly difference in vegetation colour or growth that appears in aerial imagery when soil moisture and crop stress conspire to reveal buried features below the surface.
What the cropmark shows is a roughly circular area about thirty metres in diameter, defined by a slight fosse, which is a shallow ditch, with an entrance gap of approximately five metres on the eastern side. Enclosures of this general type are common across rural Ireland, often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about the date or function of this particular one. It was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and its existence rests almost entirely on aerial observation, specifically what could be faintly detected in mapping imagery captured in 2022.
There is little here for a visitor in the conventional sense. The enclosure is not marked, not excavated, and not visible at ground level. Its interest lies precisely in that quality of near-invisibility, the fact that an entire structure, one that would once have defined somebody's domestic or agricultural world, has receded so completely that only a change in how grass grows in dry weather gives it away.