Enclosure, Cherrymount, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
At Cherrymount in County Wicklow, there is a small ancient enclosure that no one remembers.
No local tradition has kept its name alive, no field boundary or earthwork marks its outline to a person standing on the ground, and yet it was there in 1838, recorded in careful ink on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a distinct circular feature, roughly twenty-five metres at its widest point, sitting on a natural level terrace cut into a south-south-westerly facing slope.
Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular areas defined by an earthen bank or stone wall, appear throughout the Irish landscape in considerable variety. Some are the remains of early medieval farmsteads, others may be prehistoric in origin, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What the 1838 map shows is that the feature was still legible to the surveyors who walked this ground nearly two centuries ago, even if whatever above-ground structure once defined it has since collapsed or been absorbed into the surrounding terrain. The south-south-west orientation of the slope is a detail worth noting; such aspects were commonly favoured in earlier periods for settlement and agriculture, offering shelter and maximising available light. That the site is now invisible at ground level suggests the defining bank or wall has been reduced, ploughed away, or simply weathered flat over the intervening years.
There is something quietly melancholy about a place that exists only in cartographic record and archaeological inventory, with no oral tradition to give it texture. Someone built something here, arranged the ground to their purpose, and the community that once knew it has long since forgotten entirely.