Enclosure, Aghaboys, Co. Louth

They exist, for now, only as cropmarks, those faint discolourations in growing crops caused by buried ditches or banks that alter how plants take up moisture, and they were spotted not through any formal survey but through satellite imagery on Apple Maps in 2021.

Three of the enclosures are intertwined, their outlines cutting across one another in a pattern that suggests they were not all in use at the same time, but were instead built, abandoned, and perhaps reused across different periods. The most legible of the group is roughly circular, with an internal diameter of around 25 metres and a wide surrounding fosse, a ditch that would originally have defined and defended the enclosed space, running between one and three metres across. A broad entrance, approximately six metres wide, opens to the south-east. A field drain running on a north-east to south-west alignment passes straight through all three intertwined enclosures, an unmapped feature that adds another layer to an already complicated picture. The fourth enclosure sits about 50 metres to the north-east, separate from the cluster but clearly part of the same broader complex. The site was first brought to attention by Jean Charles Caillére, and the cropmark evidence was recorded in 2022.