Enclosure, Ardristan, Co. Carlow

Co. Carlow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ardristan, Co. Carlow

Beneath a ploughed field in Ardristan, County Carlow, two concentric ditches trace a circle roughly 62 metres across.

Nothing rises above the surface to mark the spot. The enclosure is invisible to anyone walking across the tillage, yet it reads clearly from above, rendered in the subtle colour differences that rippling crops leave in dry summers over buried archaeology.

The site is a bivallate enclosure, meaning it was defined by two ditches rather than the single fosse more commonly associated with a ringfort. The two fosses run roughly parallel, though not perfectly so: they sit about 4 metres apart in the northern arc and widen to around 6 metres apart towards the south, suggesting either a deliberate design choice or the gradual drift of hand-cut earthworks over time. The enclosure was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, spotted through satellite imagery captured on 14 July 2018 and confirmed against aerial photography from the Ordnance Survey. A cropmark of a field boundary cuts through the centre of the monument on a northeast-to-southwest alignment, and this boundary is no modern intrusion: it appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, indicating that whoever laid out the post-medieval field system here either did not know the older monument lay beneath, or simply did not let it stand in the way.

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