Enclosure, Connary, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In the forested slopes of Connary in County Wicklow, a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across was considered distinct enough in 1838 to be marked on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map.
By the time the revised edition appeared in 1908, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, absorbed, it seems, by the intervening decades of change on the ground. What the mapmakers of 1908 chose to omit, or simply could no longer see, the landscape has quietly preserved in fragmentary form.
The site sits on a gentle northwest-facing slope, positioned just above a sharp drop in the terrain about fifteen metres to its northwest. That original circular enclosure, of the kind that in an Irish rural context often signals early medieval settlement or agricultural organisation, left almost no visible trace when the site was examined on the ground. What survives instead is a smaller, subrectangular feature overlying the northwest sector of the earlier, larger one. This later intrusion, measuring roughly twenty-one metres north to south and ten metres east to west, is defined on its north, east, and south sides by a low earthen bank about one and a half metres wide and just over half a metre high. A slight external fosse, a shallow drainage or boundary ditch, runs along the northeast side. A well-defined gap of about one metre at the southeast corner may represent an original entrance. Whether this smaller feature was a separate enclosure or the remnant of an associated field system is not certain, but its relationship to the earlier circular form suggests the land here was reorganised at some point, with one boundary system laid down across the ghost of another.