Enclosure, Lyre, Co. Waterford

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lyre, Co. Waterford

A small enclosure on a north-west-facing slope in Lyre, County Waterford, carries a reputation it cannot quite support. Local tradition, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, identified it as an old burial ground, the kind of designation that tends to accumulate around ancient earthworks in rural Ireland. But when archaeologists looked more closely, they found no evidence of burial at all. What remains is a roughly subcircular patch of scrub-covered ground, about thirty metres across at its longest axis, enclosed by a combination of a scarp to the south-west and north-east, a stone-faced bank along the north-east to southern edge, and a straight field bank making up the rest of the boundary. The place is real enough; its story, at least the one people told about it, is harder to verify.

The site appeared on the 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though whether it was already ancient by that point or simply old enough to have acquired an air of mystery is not recorded. The enclosure itself, defined partly by a bank with an internal height of around 1.3 metres and a much more modest external face of 0.3 metres, is the kind of feature that might once have served any number of purposes, from stock management to the demarcation of a farmstead or garden. The stone-faced section of the bank suggests some deliberate construction, though the scrub that now covers the interior makes a thorough reading of the ground difficult. Without excavation, its origins remain open.

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Pete F
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