Enclosure, Clonmore, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
In the fields around Clonmore in County Wexford, there is a site that cannot be seen by standing in it.
No earthwork rises above the surrounding ground, no stone survives at the surface, and a visitor walking across the gentle east-facing slope would notice nothing at all. What exists here is a cropmark, the kind of faint trace that appears in aerial imagery when buried features affect how vegetation grows above them, revealing the outline of something long-vanished beneath the soil.
The feature is circular, with a diameter of roughly fifteen to eighteen metres, and is defined by a single fosse, which is an enclosing ditch cut into the ground. Enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and can date to a wide range of periods, from the Bronze Age through to early medieval times, when they served as farmsteads, burial grounds, or places with ritual significance. This particular example came to light not through excavation or fieldwork but through satellite imagery. Simon Dowling first identified it from a Google Earth capture dated 14 July 2018, making it, at the time of its recording, a site known only from a screen rather than from the ground itself.