Enclosure, Cookstown, Co. Meath

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cookstown, Co. Meath

At Cookstown in County Meath, a small enclosed space sits unannounced in a field, invisible to anyone walking past it and legible only from the sky.

The site exists, for now, almost entirely as a cropmark, meaning that the buried ditches of a former enclosure cause the grass or grain above them to grow at a slightly different rate or colour from the surrounding soil, producing a ghostly outline that becomes readable in aerial or satellite imagery under the right light and conditions.

The enclosure is roughly square in plan, measuring approximately 25 metres on each axis, with a subrectangular outline defined by single fosses, the term used for the ditches that would once have formed a boundary around a settlement, field, or ritual space. It sits at the crest of a south-west-facing slope, roughly 40 metres from a small meandering stream that runs roughly north-north-west to south-south-east through the landscape below. The ditches show most clearly on the south-west and north-west sides, and there is a small entrance gap in the south-west side, suggesting a deliberate opening rather than a break caused by later disturbance. The site was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and is visible on Google Earth imagery captured in July 2021.

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