Enclosure, Ardscull, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Enclosures
At Ardscull in County Kildare, beneath a working tillage field, a long-buried circular enclosure survives as little more than a ghost in the soil. No earthwork rises above the surface, no stones mark the boundary; the site reveals itself only from the air, through the faint differential growth of crops above a back-filled fosse, the term for a surrounding ditch that was once dug as a boundary or defensive feature and has since been deliberately or gradually infilled.
The enclosure is roughly circular, estimated at somewhere between twelve and fifteen metres in diameter, with the cropmark arc visible across its southern, western, and north-western sides. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried features, such as ditches filled with looser, moister soil, cause the plants directly above them to grow at a slightly different rate from the surrounding crop, a difference that becomes legible when viewed from altitude under the right light and seasonal conditions. The site was identified through aerial imagery, specifically an observation communicated by P. Reid using the Bing Maps aerial view, which suggests it came to attention not through a formal excavation programme but through the kind of careful, opportunistic observation that has contributed significantly to the mapping of Ireland's buried archaeological landscape. At twelve to fifteen metres across, the enclosure is modest in scale, consistent with a small ringfort or enclosed farmstead of early medieval date, though without excavation its precise period and function remain unknown.