Enclosure, Upton, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Upton, Co. Wexford

There is nothing to see at Upton in County Wexford, at least not from the ground.

The enclosure here exists almost entirely as a cropmark, a faint circular ghost roughly 63 metres across that only becomes legible from aerial imagery. What the photographs reveal is the outline of a fosse, the ditch that once defined the perimeter of a ringfort-type enclosure, with a gap of about five metres on the eastern side where an entrance once stood. A later roadway has clipped through the western edge, erasing around 45 metres of that circuit, and old quarries have left their own marks on the interior. The landscape has, in other words, been reading and rewriting this site for centuries without most people noticing.

The site sits on an east-facing slope near the northern end of a low ridge running roughly northeast to southwest. It was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and aerial mapping from 2004 to 2006 confirmed what later imagery made clearer still. Field drains connect to the fosse at the north and south, though some of the drainage visible in the area appears to be of more recent origin. What lends the site particular interest is what was found about 40 metres to the north, where archaeological testing uncovered habitation floors containing medieval material. That evidence of occupation sits in close proximity to a recorded graveyard site at Ballynure, roughly 30 metres to the northwest, and the medieval finds are thought to relate to both. A fosse-enclosed settlement, a medieval graveyard nearby, traces of domestic occupation in the soil between them: the picture that emerges is of a locality that was meaningfully, if quietly, inhabited during the medieval period, its layout now readable only through the patient language of cropmarks and test trenches.

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