Enclosure, Ballinglen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a south-east-facing slope in rough rocky pasture at Ballinglen in County Wicklow, there is an oval enclosure large enough to have housed a small community, yet almost invisible to anyone walking past without knowing what to look for.
Measuring roughly 80 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and around 70 metres across, it sits quietly embedded in the hillside, its boundaries formed partly by the natural scarp of the slope and partly by an earth and stone bank still standing up to 1.4 metres high in places. A small stream cuts through the interior and exits to the south-east, lending the site an oddly domestic quality; this was not simply a boundary or a pen, but a place organised around the realities of daily life.
Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval ringfort-type settlements defined by banks, ditches, or scarps, are among the most common class of early medieval monument in Ireland, typically associated with farming settlements from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. What gives this particular example some texture is what ground-level inspection alone cannot reveal. Aerial photography has identified circular and rectangular hut sites in the northern corner of the enclosure, structures that leave almost no trace underfoot in rough pasture but emerge clearly when seen from above in the right light. Three entrance gaps survive, at the south-west, north, and north-east, each around 2.5 to 3 metres wide. A sunken trackway runs along the perimeter to the north-east, possibly the remains of an outer fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, while further sunken approaches from the north-west and south-east suggest the enclosure was not an isolated feature but a focal point within a wider, organised landscape. The surrounding field systems appear to have grown up around it, or with it, rather than independently.