Enclosure, Ballyvadden, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyvadden, Co. Wexford

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or grassy mounds.

This one in Ballyvadden, County Wexford, exists only as a faint discolouration visible from space. On a satellite image captured in July 2018, a parchmark, the ghostly trace left in parched grass or soil when buried features draw moisture away unevenly, reveals the outline of a subcircular enclosure roughly 47 metres east to west and 42 metres north to south. On the ground, there is nothing obvious to see. The enclosure sits on a gentle slope facing north-east across low-lying farmland, and its presence would almost certainly have gone unrecorded were it not for the particular conditions of one dry summer's day captured by a satellite camera.

The feature was first identified by Simon Dowling, who noticed the trace on Google Earth. What he found is a near-continuous boundary line, slightly raised or depressed enough to show in aerial conditions, with notably straight sections along the northern and eastern sides, a detail that sets it apart from the softer curves one might expect of a purely natural formation. Inside the enclosure, a subrectangular feature measuring approximately 24 metres by 20 metres has also been noted, possibly the remains of a quarry, though its relationship to the enclosure itself remains unclear. Enclosures of broadly comparable size in Ireland range in date from the prehistoric through to the early medieval period, and without excavation this site cannot be assigned to any particular era. It is, for now, a shape without a story, legible only under the right atmospheric conditions and only at altitude.

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