Enclosure, Borrmount, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Borrmount, Co. Wexford

In the farmland of Borrmount, County Wexford, a circle roughly forty metres across sits invisibly in the soil, its presence betrayed only from the air.

What aerial photographs taken in 2001 reveal is a cropmark, the faint but telling discolouration that appears in growing crops when buried features alter the ground's moisture and nutrient content above them. In this case, the mark traces a circular enclosure defined by a single narrow fosse, a ditch cut into the earth, though whether the feature is ancient or altogether more recent remains an open question.

The enclosure sits towards the top of a gentle south-west-facing slope on a small north-south spur, a configuration that, in an Irish archaeological context, would be consistent with a ringfort or a similar early medieval enclosed settlement. However, the site carries a caveat rarely attached to such features: it may be a tree-ring, the circular shadow left in the soil by the root system of a long-felled tree, rather than anything made by human hands with any deliberate purpose. Two other recorded features lie nearby, a ring-ditch approximately 130 metres to the south-west and a further enclosure roughly 70 metres to the north-west, which means this corner of Wexford does appear to preserve genuine archaeological activity in its subsoil, even if this particular circle remains ambiguous.

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