Enclosure, Morett, Co. Laois

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Morett, Co. Laois

Beneath a tillage field in County Laois, a circular enclosure sits largely invisible to anyone walking the land.

It gives itself away only from the air, and only under the right conditions: a dry summer causes the buried ditch that once defined its perimeter to stress the crops above it differently, producing the faint shadow of a ring in satellite imagery. Cropmarks of this kind are among the more quietly remarkable tools in landscape archaeology, allowing features that have been ploughed flat over centuries to briefly reappear as ghosts in a grain field.

The enclosure at Morett was identified through Google Earth imagery captured in August 2022. What can be made out is a subcircular feature, roughly 53 metres north to south and just under 45 metres east to west, defined by a ditch estimated at two to three metres wide. Only a little over half of the northern arc is legible in the available imagery; the southern portion appears to have been cut across by a former field boundary, a linear feature that sweeps in a low arc from east to west, and whatever lies beneath it remains unresolved. No entrance gap has been identified. The enclosure sits at approximately 82 metres above sea level on gently undulating ground, tilting almost imperceptibly down to the north-east, where a stream and the remains of a former millrace lie about 285 metres away. To the west, the land rises slightly towards a low hillock carrying the ruins of Morett Castle, with Morett Church a further 150 metres to the south of it. Another possible enclosure has been detected roughly 75 metres to the south-south-west within the same modern field, suggesting this part of Laois may have once held a cluster of enclosed settlements or farmsteads, the precise nature and date of which remain unknown.

The site itself is not accessible as a monument in any conventional sense; it exists, for now, as a pattern in a working agricultural field, most legible during dry summers when soil moisture differences between the silted ditch and the surrounding ground are at their most pronounced. Its relationship to Morett Castle, the church, and the nearby mill has yet to be investigated, but the proximity of these features points to a landscape that was, at some point, considerably busier than the quiet tillage fields suggest today.

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