Concentric enclosure, Ballygowney, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Ballygowney, Co. Wexford

There is nothing to see at Ballygowney, Co. Wexford, at least not with the naked eye.

What survives of this prehistoric or early historic enclosure exists only as a cropmark, a ghostly imprint left in growing crops when buried ditches and earthworks affect how vegetation draws moisture from the soil. Walk the east-facing slope of the north-south ridge where the site lies and the ground gives nothing away. It took aerial imagery, specifically the iMAPs platform in 2022, to reveal what was waiting beneath the surface.

What the imagery shows is a concentric enclosure of considerable scale. An inner circular area roughly 40 metres in diameter is defined by a fosse, the term for a ditch typically dug as part of a defensive or enclosing structure, and this inner ring is separated from an outer fosse by a berm, a flat shelf of ground approximately 15 to 20 metres wide. Together, the two circuits create an overall enclosed area close to 80 metres across. No entrance has been identified in the inner enclosure, though the outer ring appears to have an opening roughly 8 metres wide on its east-south-east side. The site was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and its concentric layout places it within a tradition of enclosed sites found across Ireland, where multiple ditched rings could serve purposes ranging from settlement to ritual, though this example has not been excavated and its date and function remain open questions.

Because the enclosure is invisible on the ground and only legible through aerial analysis, there is little a visitor could observe directly. Its significance lies not in anything you could stand beside or photograph, but in the reminder that the Irish landscape holds a great deal that has not yet been seen, let alone understood, and that new technology continues to surface the unfamiliar from fields that looked, until recently, entirely ordinary.

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