Enclosure, Flemingtown, Co. Dublin

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Flemingtown, Co. Dublin

A curved ditch in a County Dublin field might seem like modest evidence for anything much, but the fragment of an enclosure uncovered at Flemingtown tells a quietly layered story.

Only about a third of the original circle survives, and yet that surviving arc is enough to trace what was once a deliberate, carefully dug boundary, enclosing a space that mattered to people living here across different eras of Irish prehistory.

Excavated in 2002 under licence number 02E0297, the remains consist of a curvilinear fosse, essentially a defining ditch, roughly one metre wide and forming part of a circle approximately 10.5 metres in diameter. A sherd of coarse pottery recovered from the ditch pointed to Bronze Age activity, and radiocarbon dating confirmed this, placing the enclosure's construction in the late Bronze Age, somewhere between 985 and 817 cal. BC. A second date, falling between 217 and 344 cal. AD, indicates that the site saw renewed use during the late Iron Age, several centuries after it was first built. At some point later again, a linear field drain cut across the enclosure, truncating it and erasing part of the record. From that drain came a sherd of Leinster cooking ware, a type of medieval pottery produced in the region, adding yet another layer to the sequence. The findings were reported by Byrnes in 2002.

The site is not signposted or publicly managed, and given that it was uncovered through excavation rather than being a visible surface monument, there is little to see above ground today. Visitors with an interest in the area would be better served by consulting the excavation report and treating Flemingtown as part of a broader landscape of prehistoric activity in north County Dublin. The significance lies less in what can now be seen than in what the soil yielded when examined carefully, a partial arc and a handful of sherds that together span well over a thousand years of human presence.

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Flemingtown, Co. Dublin
53.61796273,-6.22388781

Ref: DU04769

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