Enclosure, Morett, Co. Laois
Co. Laois |
Enclosures
In a tillage field in the low-lying midlands of County Laois, the outline of an ancient enclosure has gone unnoticed at ground level for who knows how long.
It is only from the air, through the telltale discolouration of crops known as a cropmark, that the site reveals itself. When vegetation grows over buried features such as ditches, it behaves differently from the surrounding soil, and under the right conditions of heat and dry weather, those differences register visibly from above. Satellite imagery captured in August 2022 shows two conjoined subcircular enclosures pressed into the farmland, their ditches still legible as faint arcs against the geometry of the modern field.
The larger of the two enclosures measures roughly 45 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, with a ditch estimated at around 2.5 metres wide tracing most of its circuit. A second, slightly larger enclosure appears attached to its southern side, its own ditch perhaps meeting or merging with that of its neighbour, though the imagery does not make the junction entirely clear. A third possible enclosure lies about 75 metres to the north-northeast, within the same field. No entrance gap has been identified in any of them. A modern electricity pylon now stands roughly at the centre of the main enclosure, an unremarkable fixture in the landscape that happens to mark something considerably older beneath it. The site sits at about 82 metres above sea level on gently undulating ground, with the land falling away slightly to the northeast towards a stream and the remains of a former water mill roughly 385 metres distant. To the west-northwest, a low hillock carries the ruins of Morett Castle, with the remains of Morett Church nearby to its south. The enclosures have not been excavated, and no date has been established for them, though circular ditched enclosures of this kind are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland.