Enclosure, Ballymore Demesne, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymore Demesne, Co. Wexford

On a north-facing slope in County Wexford, the ground holds a secret that is entirely invisible to anyone walking across it.

A circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter lies buried beneath what was once the demesne of Ballymore House, detectable only as a cropmark, the faint differential in vegetation growth that betrays buried ditches and earthworks to a camera looking straight down from above.

Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as filled-in ditches or the foundations of former structures, cause the soil above them to retain moisture differently from the surrounding ground. In dry summers this shows up as variations in crop or grass colour, and from the air the outlines of long-vanished enclosures can suddenly become legible. In this case, the enclosure, defined by a continuous fosse (a ditch, typically used for drainage or defence), was identified not from a manned aircraft but from satellite imagery on Google Earth, in a capture dated 14 July 2018. It was first reported by Simon Dowling. A second, outer fosse sits approximately three metres beyond the main one, running from the south-west to the north-west arc of the circle, suggesting the site may once have had a more elaborate boundary arrangement than the inner ring alone implies.

The location, towards the lower end of a fairly steep slope on former demesne land, is typical of a class of enclosed sites found across Ireland, though whether this particular example is prehistoric, early medieval, or of some later date remains unknown without further investigation. For now it exists primarily as an image, a pale ring pressed into the grass of a Wexford hillside, waiting for the right dry summer and a good enough view from overhead.

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