Enclosure, Ballyfolan, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
At Ballyfolan in County Wicklow, there is an ancient circular enclosure that you will almost certainly walk straight over without knowing it.
No earthwork rises to meet the eye, no stones break the surface, and no signpost marks the spot. The only way this site has ever been clearly seen is from the air, where the buried bank of a roughly thirty-metre-wide circular enclosure shows up as a cropmark, the kind of faint differential in how vegetation grows over disturbed or compacted soil that reveals what the ground refuses to show at eye level.
Circular enclosures of this kind are among the more common, and more quietly puzzling, features of the Irish archaeological landscape. They may represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied from roughly the early medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a firm date or function to any individual example. What can be said of this one is that it sits on a gently west-facing hillslope, with the land falling away more steeply to the east, a position that would have offered practical advantages in terms of drainage and outlook. A possible entrance gap appears on the western side of the bank, consistent with the westward orientation of many comparable sites across the country.