Enclosure, Ballynavortha, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In a wheat field on the Wicklow-Carlow border, a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres across exists almost entirely as an absence.
There is nothing to see at ground level; no earthwork, no raised ring, no trace of stonework breaking the soil. What marks this place out is precisely that erasure, the fact that it was once recorded and is now, to the naked eye, simply gone.
The enclosure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey map, which in Ireland dates from the mid-nineteenth century and represents one of the most systematic efforts ever made to capture the country's historical features in cartographic form. At that point, something was evidently still legible in the landscape, enough to be noted and plotted. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature across Ireland, typically the remains of a ringfort or a small enclosed farmstead, a type of settlement used from the early medieval period onwards. They varied considerably in size and construction, from substantial earthen banks to low, barely perceptible rings. A diameter of around twenty-five metres would place this one at the modest end of the scale. The site sits on a gentle north-west facing slope overlooking a stream, a position that would have made practical sense for any early farming community seeking water access and some shelter from prevailing winds. Over the intervening century and a half since the first Ordnance Survey, ploughing and agricultural use have reduced whatever remained to something detectable only from above, or below.