Enclosure, Knockanode, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
Beneath a wheat field on a south-east-facing slope in County Wicklow, a D-shaped enclosure roughly fifty metres across lies completely invisible to anyone standing on the ground above it.
There is nothing to see, no earthwork, no hollow, no subtle change in the vegetation, just an ordinary agricultural field on an ordinary ridge. The enclosure exists now primarily as a cartographic fact.
What we know of it comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, one of the earliest systematic surveys of the Irish landscape, produced at a time when many earthworks and field boundaries that have since vanished were still legible on the surface. The surveyors recorded a D-shaped enclosure, that is, a roughly semicircular form closed off by a straight side, measuring approximately fifty metres on its longer axis and thirty-five metres across. Enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and can date to anywhere from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval, often representing the remains of a ringfort or similar enclosed settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say what period or purpose this particular example belongs to. At some point between the mid-nineteenth century and today, whatever bank or ditch once defined it was levelled, most likely through repeated ploughing, leaving the feature detectable only through aerial photography or geophysical survey rather than by eye. It sits just below the crest of a north-north-east to south-south-west ridge at Knockanode, a position that would have offered a degree of shelter from prevailing westerlies while still commanding a view across the slope below.