Enclosure, Ballinahinch, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In the sheep pasture east of Ballinahinch, County Wicklow, lies an enclosure that exists more convincingly on paper than it does in the ground.
The Ordnance Survey's first-edition six-inch map records it clearly: a large oval earthwork, roughly 100 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 84 metres across, sitting on a very gentle east-facing slope at the margin where improved pasture gives way to wet, marshy rough grazing. When the site was inspected in 2006, nothing was visible at ground level. The enclosure had effectively vanished from the landscape, leaving only its cartographic ghost.
Enclosures of this oval or roughly circular type are a familiar, if varied, feature of the Irish countryside. They could serve many purposes depending on their age and context, from early medieval settlement enclosures to stock management features associated with later farming practice. The Ballinahinch example was substantial enough to register prominently on two successive editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, and those early maps also showed field boundaries radiating outward from its south-east and south-south-west edges, suggesting it once formed a meaningful node in the local field system. By the time of the 2006 inspection, those radiating boundaries had been removed as well, the whole arrangement quietly erased by agricultural improvement over the intervening decades.