Enclosure, Duneany, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Duneany, Co. Kildare

In a tillage field in Duneany, Co. Kildare, a long-vanished enclosure betrays itself only from the air. No earthwork breaks the surface, no stone survives above ground; what remains is a cropmark, the faint differential in how crops grow over buried features, soil compressed by ancient walls or ditches causing plants above them to behave differently from those in undisturbed ground. Seen in aerial photography, these ghostly outlines can preserve the plan of a structure that has otherwise left no trace at the surface.

The enclosure measures approximately 52 metres east to west and 43 metres north to south, with an annexe attached to its northern side. Enclosures of this general type are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, used across many centuries for settlement, agriculture, or ritual purposes, though without excavation it is difficult to say much about the date or function of this particular example. What adds a quiet layer of interest here is that a second enclosure, a separate recorded site, lies just 90 metres to the west-northwest, suggesting this was not an isolated feature but part of a broader pattern of activity in the area. A field boundary running east to west cuts across the southern edge of the enclosure, a later imposition on the landscape that neatly illustrates how successive generations have drawn and redrawn the land without necessarily knowing what lay beneath. The cropmark was identified in Google Earth aerial imagery captured on 28 June 2018.

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Pete F
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