Enclosure, Island, Co. Carlow

Co. Carlow |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Island, Co. Carlow

A field in County Carlow holds a secret that only becomes visible from above, and only under the right conditions.

In the summer of 2018, satellite imagery captured what the ground gives away during a dry spell: a cropmark, the faint but legible shadow of something buried, tracing the outline of a small sub-square enclosure across a tillage field near Island. Cropmarks appear when crops grow unevenly over buried features; walls or compacted ground stunt growth, while ditches, with their deeper, moister soil, encourage it, and the differential shows up in aerial photographs with striking clarity.

The enclosure, identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère from Google Earth imagery dated 14 July 2018, measures approximately twelve metres east to west and ten metres north to south. It is the smaller of two such enclosures in the immediate area, sitting roughly four metres west of a somewhat larger companion feature. The two together form an unusual pairing, their sub-square shapes suggesting an organised, possibly enclosed settlement or farmstead from an earlier period of Irish history, though the buried archaeology has yet to be excavated or closely dated. Without disturbance of the ploughsoil, the enclosures remain locked beneath the crops, known only through the patterns they press onto the surface each summer.

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