Enclosure, Ballynerrin, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynerrin, Co. Wicklow

In the gently rolling farmland of Ballynerrin in County Wicklow, there is an ancient enclosure that cannot be seen by anyone standing on it.

No earthwork rises from the soil, no stones mark a boundary, and there is nothing to tell a passing walker that anything of archaeological significance lies underfoot. The site exists, for practical purposes, only from the air.

The enclosure is oval in shape, with an estimated maximum diameter of around 50 metres, and was defined by a fosse, the term for a ditch cut into the ground as a boundary or defensive feature. Traces of a second inner fosse are also detectable toward the north-east, suggesting the enclosure may once have had a more complex internal arrangement than its outer circuit alone implies. What is known of its form comes from a cropmark observed on an aerial photograph, a phenomenon that occurs when buried ditches or foundations affect how crops grow above them, producing subtle differences in colour or height that become legible only when viewed from altitude. At ground level, the fosse has long since silted and levelled, absorbed back into the agricultural landscape of the Wicklow lowlands.

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Pete F
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