Enclosure, Barranaghs, Co. Offaly

This one in Barranaghs, County Offaly, offers nothing of the sort. On the ground, there is only what anyone might dismiss as ordinary uneven terrain, natural humps and hollows that give no suggestion of human intention or design. The county's six-inch ordnance survey maps recorded nothing of archaeological interest in the area at all, and for a long time that seemed to settle the matter.

What changed the picture was not excavation or fieldwork but a set of aerial photographs taken in 1973. Seen from above, subtle cropmarks or soil patterns, the kind of detail invisible to someone walking the land, suggested the outline of an enclosure beneath the surface. Aerial archaeology works on the principle that buried features, ditches, banks, foundations, affect how vegetation grows or how soil retains moisture, producing faint but readable marks when viewed from altitude. The photographs in question, catalogued under GSI references N 408/9 and N 207/8, were enough to have the site designated as a potential enclosure, a broad category that can encompass anything from a prehistoric farmstead surrounded by a circular bank and ditch to a later defended settlement. Without excavation, the precise nature, date, and extent of whatever lies at Barranaghs remains genuinely unknown.