Enclosure, Loftushall, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
In a level stretch of Wexford countryside near Loftushall, something circular lies just beneath the surface of an ordinary-looking field.
No earthwork rises above the ground, no obvious feature catches the eye from the road, yet aerial imagery reveals the ghost of an enclosure roughly 37 metres across, its outline traced by a slight fosse, the term for a shallow ditch or depression, that has been quietly filling in for centuries. The only thing that gives it away is a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features cause subtle differences in how crops or grass grow above them, producing patterns visible from height that are entirely invisible at ground level.
The enclosure was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and its presence has since been confirmed through both Google Earth imagery captured in September 2019 and aerial mapping data from 2019 and 2022. A field bank running roughly west-northwest to east-southeast clips the northern edge of the circle, truncating it slightly and suggesting that later land divisions were laid out without any awareness of, or concern for, whatever ancient boundary lay beneath. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish archaeological landscape and may represent the remains of a ringfort, a burial monument, or some other enclosed settlement or ceremonial site, though without excavation, the function and date of this particular example remain open questions.

