Enclosure, Coolroe, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In the townland of Coolroe in County Wicklow, on a gentle east-facing slope, there is a circular enclosure that exists primarily as a cartographic fact.
It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, drawn at a maximum diameter of twenty metres, and it has not been visible at ground level since at least the time anyone thought to look carefully. That combination, mapped but vanished, gives the site an odd quality: it is easier to locate on paper than in the field.
Circular enclosures of this kind are found throughout Ireland and generally date from the early medieval period, though they can be earlier or later depending on context. They typically served as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites, defined by an earthen bank or a shallow ditch, sometimes both. At twenty metres across, this would have been a modest example, roughly the size of a large domestic garden. The fact that it was legible to the OS surveyors in 1838 suggests that some trace of bank or depression still showed in the landscape at that point, even if subsequent ploughing or land improvement has since erased what little remained.