Enclosure, Coldblow, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Coldblow, Co. Wexford

Near Coldblow in County Wexford, a circular enclosure of around forty metres in diameter survives not as a wall or earthwork, but as a faint impression in the grass.

It is the kind of feature that disappears the moment you look at it straight on, visible only from the air, where the differential growth of vegetation betrays a buried boundary that the ground itself has long since swallowed.

Enclosures of this type are common across the Irish landscape, most often associated with early medieval settlement or ritual activity, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What the aerial photographs reveal at Coldblow is a roughly circular mark, with what may be a path running from south through north to south-east, tracing a single defining feature across gently undulating ground. The site sits quietly within an ordinary agricultural field, its shape preserved not in stone or raised earth but in the way grass grows differently over disturbed or compacted soil beneath the surface. These vegetation marks are fragile records; they show up clearly in dry summers when shallow-rooted grass over buried features stresses and yellows before the surrounding sward, and can vanish entirely in a wet year or after ploughing.

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Pete F
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