Enclosure, Glencullen Mountain, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Enclosures
On the north-facing slope of Glencullen Mountain, there is an ancient enclosure that no longer exists in any visible sense.
It has been swallowed entirely by forestry planting, leaving not a stone, not a hollow, not a trace that anything was ever there. The only evidence of its existence lies in two historical maps and a brief archaeological note, which together sketch the outline of something that was once, by any measure, a substantial structure.
The 1843 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a roughly circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately thirty metres, situated on a terrace cut into the hillside. An enclosure of this kind, a defined area bounded by a wall or bank, was a common feature of the early Irish landscape, used variously for settlement, agriculture, or ritual purposes, though the function of this particular example is not recorded. By the time the 1937 Ordnance Survey edition was produced, the site was still legible enough to be mapped as a ring of closely set stones. Sometime after that, the trees went in. Healy, writing in 1975, noted that the planting had by then obscured any surface evidence entirely.
Glencullen Mountain sits in the Dublin Mountains, and the terrace on which this enclosure once sat would have offered a northward prospect over the valley below. There is no marked trail to the site, and given that the forestry has left nothing visible above ground, a visit is more an exercise in reading landscape than in seeing archaeology. Anyone drawn to the area should be aware that the approach involves rough upland terrain. The value here is less in standing at the spot than in understanding how quickly a place can be erased, not by time alone, but by a single land-use decision made at some point in the mid-twentieth century.