Enclosure, Grange, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
At Grange in County Wexford, there is an enclosure that you cannot see by standing in a field.
It reveals itself only from the air, appearing as a faint D-shaped outline pressed into the earth, roughly 35 metres along its longer axis and 20 metres across, its form betrayed by the way crops or grass grow differently over buried ground. That difference, a phenomenon known as a cropmark, occurs when a filled-in ditch or fosse alters the moisture and nutrients available to plants above it, causing them to ripen or wilt at a slightly different rate than the surrounding growth. From altitude, those subtle variations in colour and height resolve into the geometry of a structure that has otherwise entirely vanished from the surface.
The enclosure was identified through aerial photography, appearing on multiple sets of images including those taken in July 2006 and on earlier grass-cover photographs from the Ordnance Survey Ireland series dating to around 2000. The defining feature is a fosse, essentially a broad ditch that would originally have enclosed whatever lay inside the D-shaped boundary. Enclosures of this kind are common across the Irish landscape and can date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval, when ringforts and similar enclosed settlements were in widespread use. Without excavation it is not possible to say precisely when this one was made or what it contained, but its proportions and form place it comfortably within that long tradition of enclosed settlement and land division in Leinster.