Enclosure, Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On the outskirts of Baltinglass in County Wicklow, there is an oval enclosure that you cannot see.
It sits on level ground to the south-east of an abandoned quarry, measuring roughly twenty metres along its north-east to south-west axis and fifteen metres across, and the only reason anyone knows it exists is because a cartographer recorded it in 1838. At ground level today, there is nothing to indicate its presence.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most ambitious cartographic projects ever undertaken in Ireland, captured the enclosure at a moment when it was presumably still legible in some form, whether as a slight earthen bank, a change in vegetation, or a faint depression in the soil. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, typically formed by a bank and ditch defining a roughly circular or oval area, and associated with a wide range of uses across prehistory and the early medieval period, from domestic settlement to ritual activity. In the intervening century and a half since that map was made, whatever remained above ground has been lost entirely, absorbed back into the field surface through ploughing, settlement, or simple erosion.