Enclosure, Gibstown, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gibstown, Co. Wicklow

On a south-facing slope above the Little Slaney River in County Wicklow, there is an archaeological site that exists almost entirely on paper.

A subcircular enclosure, roughly 40 metres across at its widest point, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1908, but today it leaves no impression on the ground whatsoever. The land around it has been improved for agriculture, and that process of levelling, draining, and reseeding has effectively erased whatever earthwork or boundary once defined this place.

Enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside. They tend to be the remains of early medieval ringforts, circular enclosures defined by a bank and ditch that once contained a farmstead and its associated buildings, or occasionally they represent the boundaries of earlier prehistoric settlements or ritual sites. The dimensions here, approximately 40 metres north-east to south-west and 30 metres north-west to south-east, are consistent with a modest ringfort. What the 1908 map recorded was presumably still legible as an earthwork at that time, at least from the perspective of a surveyor working across open farmland. The subsequent century of agricultural improvement has done what it so often does in lowland Wicklow, quietly absorbing the evidence into the fields.

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