Enclosure, Curraheen, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Enclosures
On a shoulder of land where the Comeragh Mountains begin their eastward descent into the Waterford countryside, a low earthwork survives in rough pasture, largely unnoticed. It is the remnant of an enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval earthen boundary that once defined a settled or ceremonial space in early medieval Ireland, and most of what it once was has long since gone back into the ground.
What remains is a scarp at the northern arc of the original bank, running approximately 21.5 metres in length, around three metres wide and 1.4 metres high. That modest ridge is now doing a second shift in life, pressed into service as a field boundary, which is both the reason it has survived at all and the reason it is easy to overlook. Countless enclosures across Ireland have been preserved precisely because a later generation found them useful as ready-made field banks, the ancient earthwork absorbed into a working agricultural landscape without anyone necessarily knowing or caring what it originally was. The rest of the enclosing circuit has been lost, leaving only this northern stretch as evidence that something more complete once stood here.
