Enclosure, Aughfad, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
On a west-facing slope near the southern tip of a ridge running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest in County Wexford, a circular enclosure sits largely out of sight.
It cannot be seen by walking the land. It appears only as a cropmark, a faint ghost in aerial imagery, where the soil and whatever lies beneath it cause the vegetation above to grow differently, betraying the outline of something deliberately made long ago.
The enclosure was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and what the aerial data reveals is a circular area roughly 40 metres in diameter, defined by a single fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch, often the most durable part of an early enclosure once any accompanying bank has spread or been ploughed away. Here, part of the original perimeter has been absorbed into a field bank along the southeast to south arc, which is both why the feature has survived at all and why it is so difficult to read on the ground. Within the interior, something in the southwest quadrant may be a pit, though the imagery is not conclusive. The enclosure is visible only through enhanced aerial mapping from 2022, meaning it joins a category of sites that exist in the record without yet existing in any meaningful way in the physical experience of the landscape.
