Enclosure, Cherrymount, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
A field near Cherrymount in County Wicklow carries two old names that together suggest something was once considered significant here, even if the ground itself gives nothing away.
Locals call the spot 'The Raheen', a diminutive derived from the Irish word ráth, meaning a ringfort or earthen enclosure, and the small field immediately to the south-east is known simply as 'The Graveyard'. Nothing is visible above ground today, and apparently nothing has been for as long as anyone can remember.
The site sits on level to very gently sloping, south-east-facing ground at the foot of a more pronounced drop in the landscape. It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 as a small enclosure with a maximum diameter of around 25 metres. At that scale, the cartographers clearly saw something worth marking, whether an earthwork, a slight rise, or simply a boundary that local knowledge had preserved. Raheen-type enclosures of this size are often associated with early medieval settlement, functioning as a protected domestic space for a farmstead and its inhabitants. The proximity of a field called 'The Graveyard' adds a layer of ambiguity; small burial grounds sometimes accumulated near occupied sites, or near sites that held some older ceremonial significance, though no excavation appears to have established what, if anything, lies beneath this particular patch of ground.
What makes the place quietly interesting is precisely its blankness. The names have outlasted whatever physical form the enclosure once had, carried forward through generations of local usage long after the features themselves disappeared. A name like 'The Raheen' is often the last surviving evidence of a monument, a verbal fossil embedded in everyday conversation about which field is which.