Enclosure, Coolkeeran, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Coolkeeran, Co. Wexford

Near Coolkeeran in County Wexford, a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter lies invisible at ground level, betrayed only from the air.

No earthwork survives, no ring of stones, no obvious depression in the field. What remains is a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried features, in this case a single fosse or ditch cut into the subsoil, cause the vegetation above them to grow differently depending on the season and soil moisture, leaving a faint circular shadow legible only in aerial photographs.

The enclosure sits on a fairly level stretch of landscape, a setting common to many such features across the Irish countryside. A second enclosure lies approximately 10 metres to the east, suggesting that whatever activity occurred here was not isolated to a single structure. Circular enclosed sites of this general scale are associated across Ireland with a broad range of functions and periods, from early medieval farmsteads and ringforts to prehistoric ceremonial use, and without excavation it is difficult to say more precisely what this one represents. The cropmark evidence alone confirms that something was deliberately dug here at some point, that the ground was shaped by human hands, and that the shape chosen was a circle.

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