Enclosure, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
Beneath a gently sloping field in Kilbride, Co. Wicklow, lies the outline of an enclosure that has not been visible to anyone standing on the ground for a very long time, possibly ever in living memory.
The only reason anyone knows it exists at all is because a camera mounted in an aircraft happened to pass over it under the right conditions, and the grass gave it away.
The enclosure came to official attention through aerial photography carried out by the Geological Survey of Ireland in 1973. In the photographs, the outline of an oval enclosure, roughly 57 metres in diameter, appeared as a cropmark, the phenomenon where buried features cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, often revealing themselves as faint rings or lines visible only from altitude and only in certain seasons or dry spells. The site sits on a gentle west to south-west facing slope in what is now improved pasture, the kind of land that has been worked and reworked over generations. Enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological features found across Ireland, and while their dates and functions vary considerably, many are associated with early medieval settlement, ranging from simple farmsteads to more substantial enclosed settlements. This one was formally recorded in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1996 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1995, giving it a degree of legal protection even though nothing of it breaks the surface.