Enclosure, Tomacork, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tomacork, Co. Wicklow

On a south-east-facing slope in Tomacork, County Wicklow, a large D-shaped enclosure has been slowly disappearing into the landscape for centuries, its boundaries gradually absorbed by the ordinary field systems around it.

At roughly 100 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 70 metres across, this is no modest earthwork, yet it passes almost unnoticed, its outline now read as a field boundary on modern maps rather than as the ancient structure it actually is.

The western perimeter is the most legible surviving section, where an earthen bank, between 1.3 and 1.8 metres high and 4.5 metres wide, retains a vertical internal facing of drystone, the kind of construction detail that suggests considerable effort and intention behind the original build. Outside the bank runs a fosse, a defensive or enclosing ditch, here measuring between 2.5 and 3 metres wide and 1.5 metres deep. The north-east and south-west sides of the enclosure have merged with later field boundaries and are difficult to distinguish without knowing what to look for. The straight south-east side, which would have completed the D-shape, is marked on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map but has since been removed entirely from the ground. That early map is in some ways now the clearest record of the enclosure as a coherent whole, preserving its outline at a moment when it was still, just about, readable as a single form rather than a patchwork of agricultural edges.

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Pete F
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