Enclosure, Rowans Little, Co. Dublin

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rowans Little, Co. Dublin

There is an enclosure at Rowans Little, in County Dublin, that no one standing in the field can see.

It exists, in any practical sense, only from the air, and even then only under the right conditions: a dry summer, a camera pointed downward, and the particular way that buried archaeology bleaches or darkens the grass above it.

The evidence for this site comes from a single aerial photograph, reference FSI 50819, taken in 1972. In that image, a roughly circular cropmark appears in a sloping field of pasture south of a stream, measuring approximately 40 metres in diameter. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried ditches or banks, long since levelled, retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above them to grow at a slightly different rate or colour. The result, invisible from ground level, can read clearly from altitude as a ghostly outline of something that once stood there. Circular enclosures of this general type are a common feature of the Irish landscape from the early medieval period, and while no date has been confirmed for this particular site, the form is consistent with a ringfort, a class of enclosed farmstead typically built and occupied between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and updated by Christine Baker, with the entry uploaded in November 2014.

Because the enclosure is not visible at ground level, a visit to Rowans Little is a peculiar kind of exercise. The field itself is pasture on a slope, and there is nothing to indicate that anything lies beneath it. The most a visitor can realistically do is stand approximately where the photograph places the site and consider that somewhere underfoot, the curve of an old ditch is retaining its secrets in the soil. Those with access to aerial photography archives or mapping platforms that include historic imagery may find it more rewarding to examine the 1972 photograph directly, where the circular cropmark is considerably more legible than anything the ground itself offers.

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Rowans Little, Co. Dublin
53.56225246,-6.22484925

Ref: DU00094

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