Enclosure, Burgage, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Enclosures
Somewhere beneath a large arable field in Burgage, County Dublin, a circular enclosure sits invisible to anyone walking past it.
There is no mound, no visible bank, no obvious sign of anything at all, and yet on a Google Earth image captured on 24 June 2018, the whole structure appears as a positive cropmark, meaning the buried ditch beneath promoted slightly lusher growth in the crop above, tracing out the enclosure's shape in green against green. It is the kind of site that only reveals itself under specific conditions of light, season, and satellite angle.
The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 35.6 metres north to south and 33.9 metres east to west, and it is surrounded by a ditch roughly 2 metres wide. No clear entrance gap has been identified through the bank, which is itself no longer visible above ground. The site lies about 1 kilometre south-east of a cluster of monuments in the neighbouring Springhill townland, centred on a known enclosure recorded as DU015-057, suggesting this part of County Dublin supported a degree of settled or organised activity in the past. An unnamed stream running west to east, a tributary of the Mayne River, passes approximately 23 metres to the north of the enclosure. The record was compiled by Tom Condit and uploaded to the national monuments database in February 2021.
Because the enclosure is buried within an actively farmed arable field, there is nothing to see on the ground and access would not be appropriate without permission from the landowner. The cropmark itself, which is the most useful way to appreciate the site's form, is best examined through Google Earth using the June 2018 imagery. Anyone with an interest in the wider area might look also at the Springhill complex nearby, which offers slightly more visible archaeological context. The Mayne River and its tributaries provide a useful navigational thread through this part of north County Dublin, and the stream just north of this enclosure is a reasonable landmark when trying to orient yourself to its approximate location on a map.