Enclosure, Ballinasilloge, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a gently sloping hillside in Ballinasilloge, County Wicklow, there is an archaeological site that exists more convincingly on paper than it does in the ground.
A circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across, it has effectively vanished from the surface of the field it once shaped, leaving no visible trace for anyone walking across it today.
What we do know comes largely from the cartographic record. The enclosure was captured as a hachured feature on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, those early and remarkably thorough surveys that documented earthworks, field boundaries, and landscape features across Ireland at a time when many such monuments were still legible at ground level. Hachuring, the use of short radiating lines to indicate a raised or defined edge, was the standard convention for showing earthwork boundaries on those maps, and its presence here suggests the enclosure was still physically meaningful to the surveyors who recorded it. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape; they range from early medieval ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads, to much earlier prehistoric boundaries, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which category a given example belongs to. In the nearly two centuries since the OS survey, this one has been reduced to nothing detectable from the ground, most likely through continued agricultural activity on the southeast-facing slope where it sits.