Enclosure, Aghaboys, Co. Louth

Co. Louth |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Aghaboys, Co. Louth

Four enclosures lie buried beneath a low-lying stretch of farmland in Aghaboys, County Louth, invisible to anyone walking the ground and absent from official maps.

The only way to see them at all is to look at satellite imagery: the cropmarks, those ghostly outlines in grass or grain caused by buried features drawing moisture differently from the surrounding soil, appear in Apple Maps imagery from 2021. Three of the enclosures are intertwined, their outlines cutting across one another, while a fourth sits roughly fifty metres to the north-east. It is a peculiar situation, where modern consumer mapping software has effectively done the work of archaeological fieldwork.

The largest of the intercutting features is roughly circular, around twenty-five metres in diameter, and is defined by a single slight fosse, which is simply a shallow ditch or trench dug to demarcate an area. The fosse is approximately one metre wide, making it a modest boundary rather than anything defensive or imposing. The southern side of this enclosure has been disturbed by what appears to be a large, irregular quarry, likely the result of several overlapping extraction pits cut into the ground at different times. Running through all three of the clustered enclosures is a north-east to south-west field drain that does not appear on any existing maps, adding another layer of complexity to the site. The complex was first brought to attention by Jean Charles Caillére, and the cropmarks have not yet been subject to any ground investigation that would clarify their date or function.

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Pete F
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