Enclosure, Effernoge, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
At Effernoge in County Wexford, a set of earthwork enclosures lies almost entirely invisible to anyone walking the fields above them.
No banks rise from the ground, no obvious outline catches the eye from the road. What reveals the site instead is the crop itself: in dry summers, buried ditches and filled-in features create subtle differences in soil moisture and depth, and those differences show up in aerial photographs as variations in vegetation colour and growth, a phenomenon known as a cropmark. It is through exactly this effect, captured on Google Earth imagery from June and July 2018, that two concentric enclosures have been identified on a slight rise in what is otherwise low-lying agricultural land.
The inner of the two is rectangular, measuring roughly 50 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, defined by wide fosses, that is, ditches or moats, running between four and six metres across. At its centre sits what appears to be a large quarry pit around 15 metres in diameter, with a drainage channel extending away to the east-south-east. The outer enclosure is oval, considerably larger at approximately 90 metres by 65 metres, and bounded by a fosse that widens noticeably from around three metres on its eastern side to as much as eight metres toward the south-west. This outer circuit is only partially traceable in the imagery, interrupted in places by later field banks, though there are hints at the south-east of a further rectangular enclosure attached to the perimeter. The site was first reported by Simon Dowling, and the combination of nested enclosures, one rectangular within one oval, is an arrangement that raises questions about function and date that the cropmarks alone cannot answer.
