Enclosure, Ballymoney, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymoney, Co. Wicklow

There is a particular category of Irish archaeological site that exists more on paper than on the ground, places whose entire presence has been reduced to a notation on an old map and a phrase in an inventory: "not visible at ground level".

The circular enclosure at Ballymoney in County Wicklow belongs firmly to that category. It survives now only as a record of what once stood on a north-west-facing slope, a quarry having long since consumed whatever earthworks or stonework once defined its roughly 24-metre diameter.

The enclosure was captured on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, one of the most ambitious cartographic undertakings in nineteenth-century Ireland, which recorded field boundaries, ruins, and earthworks with a thoroughness that has since proved invaluable precisely because so many of those features no longer exist. Circular enclosures of this kind are generally understood as early medieval farmsteads, the enclosed equivalent of a ringfort, though without further investigation the precise date and function of the Ballymoney example cannot be established. What is certain is that by the time anyone thought to formally record its archaeology, the site had already been overtaken by quarrying activity, leaving only the OS map as evidence that something was ever there at all.

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