Enclosure, Knockskemolin, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockskemolin, Co. Wexford

On a south-east-facing slope in County Wexford, the outline of an ancient enclosure lies almost entirely invisible to anyone standing on the ground.

The only way to see it is from above, and even then only under the right conditions: a satellite image captured on 14 July 2018 via Google Earth reveals a faint subcircular cropmark, roughly 35 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, pressed into the earth on the slope of a north-east to south-west ridge at Knockskemolin.

Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried archaeological features, such as the filled-in ditches of an old enclosure, affect how plants grow above them. Ditches retain moisture and nutrients, encouraging crops to grow taller and greener over their lines, while compacted buried walls or foundations have the opposite effect. Seen from altitude in the right season and the right light, these differences in plant growth can trace the plan of a structure that has otherwise vanished entirely from the surface. In this case, a modern field bank running north-west to south-east cuts straight across the enclosure, bisecting it, and the south-western portion is only barely discernible beneath what appears to be a root crop at the time the image was taken. The site was first reported by Simon Dowling, and it represents the kind of discovery that has become increasingly common as aerial and satellite imagery is scrutinised for traces of a landscape that farming and time have otherwise erased.

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