Enclosure, Grahormick, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Grahormick, Co. Wexford

At Grahormick in County Wexford, something that may have taken considerable human effort to construct is now entirely invisible from the ground.

A rectangular enclosure, roughly 50 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, leaves no trace whatsoever in a field of root crops. The only evidence it exists at all comes from the air, where a cropmark betrays the outline of a single fosse, a ditch cut into the earth, whose fill affects how the overlying vegetation grows just enough to be caught on aerial photography.

Cropmarks of this kind appear when differences in soil depth or moisture, often caused by buried ditches or foundations, cause crops to ripen at slightly different rates. From altitude, those variations read as pale or dark lines against the surrounding field. The Grahormick enclosure was identified on an aerial photograph from the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, and its proportions place it at the smaller end of enclosed features in the Irish landscape. Whether it was a farmstead boundary, a small field system, or something with a more formal purpose is uncertain. It sits on a gentle rise, which was a typical choice for enclosures of many periods, offering modest drainage and a slight vantage over the surrounding ground.

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