Enclosure, Cullen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In a tillage field in County Wicklow, the ground holds the faint outline of something much older than the crops growing over it.
A bivallate enclosure, meaning one defined by two concentric ditches rather than one, lies mostly buried here near Cullen, its northern arc just legible from aerial photography. The outer ditch runs to about 2.3 metres wide, the inner to roughly 1.46 metres, with some 5.5 metres of space between them. The whole feature, subcircular in plan, measures approximately 77 metres north to south and 72.4 metres east to west. No entrance gap has been identified, which makes its original function and layout harder to read, though the slightly curving field boundary to the south may itself be tracing the old outer bank, absorbed into the working landscape over centuries without anyone necessarily noticing.
The enclosure sits at around 76 metres above sea level on gently undulating ground, with the land rising to the west and more sharply to the southeast. That southeastern rise, roughly 675 metres away and reaching about 223 metres in height, carries a cairn known locally as 'the Old Woman', now swallowed by forestry plantation. A cairn in this context is a prehistoric stone mound, often associated with burial, and the local name hints at a long folk memory attached to the hilltop even if the monument itself has become invisible under the trees. Within a couple of kilometres of the enclosure lie further traces of an older human presence: the remains of a structure recorded as Dunganstown Castle on the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of around 1840, dating to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and a pair of similarly dated houses at Ballymurrin to the west. The enclosure itself almost certainly predates all of these, though without excavation its age remains uncertain.