Enclosure, Aghaboys, Co. Louth

Co. Louth |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Aghaboys, Co. Louth

In a low-lying corner of County Louth, a cluster of ancient enclosures lies invisible to anyone walking the ground.

No earthworks survive, no raised banks, no obvious trace of anything at all. The only way to see them is through a commercial satellite image: cropmarks captured by Apple Maps in 2021 betray the buried outlines of four enclosures that would otherwise go entirely unnoticed.

Cropmarks form when buried ditches or banks affect the moisture and nutrients available to surface vegetation, causing crops or grass above them to grow slightly differently, differences that become legible from the air in the right conditions and the right season. Here, three of the enclosures are intertwined with one another, suggesting either a complex of related structures or successive phases of activity on the same ground. The fourth sits roughly fifty metres to the north-east, slightly apart from the group. That outlying enclosure is roughly circular, with an internal diameter of around twenty metres and an outer diameter of about thirty, defined by a wide ditch or fosse somewhere between five and eight metres across. Unusually, no entrance causeway has been identified, the uncut strip of ground that would normally allow passage across such a ditch. Whether that absence reflects the limits of what cropmark analysis can reveal, or something genuinely distinctive about the original design, is difficult to say. The complex was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and the site remains poorly understood beyond what aerial imagery has so far disclosed.

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