Enclosure, Croghan Middle, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
On the southern slope of Croghan Mountain in County Wexford, a small circular enclosure sits beneath a field of ordinary pasture, entirely invisible to anyone walking over it.
No earthwork breaks the grass, no raised ring or hollow betrays what lies beneath. The only record of its existence at ground level, effectively, is the fact that it once appeared on a map.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839, one of the earliest systematic cartographic surveys of the Irish landscape, recorded it as a small enclosure with a diameter of roughly twenty to twenty-five metres. Enclosures of this kind, which in Irish archaeology typically refer to a roughly circular area defined by a bank, ditch, or wall, appear across the country in enormous numbers and served a wide range of purposes: some were ringforts used as farmsteads in the early medieval period, others had ritual or funerary functions reaching back further still. What this particular example was built for, and by whom, is not recorded. What is recorded is its setting: at the foot of a south-facing slope, in the valley of a small east-west stream running about fifty metres to the south, a location that would have offered shelter, water, and reasonable grazing ground.
The fact that the enclosure no longer shows at ground level in pasture suggests that centuries of ploughing, grazing, or simple erosion have levelled whatever bank or ditch once defined it. It survives now as a cartographic ghost, more legible on a nineteenth-century map than in the landscape itself.