Enclosure, Laughanstown, Co. Dublin

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Laughanstown, Co. Dublin

On a sloping piece of ground in Laughanstown, on the southern fringes of County Dublin, a low earthen bank traces out a rough oval that most people will have walked past, or over, without ever registering its presence.

The enclosure measures approximately 43 metres north-west to south-east and 40 metres north-east to south-west, defined by a single bank, and it survives quietly in a landscape that has absorbed a great deal of suburban development in recent decades.

The site was not recorded through fieldwork in the conventional sense. It came to light in 2014, when Dr Stephen Davis of the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin was reviewing LiDAR data, a remote-sensing technique that uses laser pulses to detect subtle variations in ground surface that are invisible at eye level and often obscured by vegetation or soil accumulation. Once the feature had been identified through LiDAR, researchers were able to confirm its presence on an aerial photograph taken as far back as 21 January 2005, where the outline of the bank is legible from above even if it registers as little more than a faint shadow on the ground. The record was compiled by Paul Walsh and uploaded on 2 October 2014. The enclosure itself has not, on the basis of the available notes, been excavated or definitively dated, and its original function, whether as a ringfort, an agricultural enclosure, or something else entirely, remains an open question.

Enclosures of this general type and scale, defined by a single earthen bank, are common across Ireland and are frequently associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation that connection here is speculative. What is less speculative is how easily a feature like this can disappear from view in a peri-urban environment. Anyone curious enough to look for the bank should be aware that the surrounding landscape has changed considerably, and verifying access and the current condition of the earthwork before visiting would be sensible. The pleasure of a site like this lies less in what you can see on the ground and more in knowing what the data revealed: a faint but legible mark, preserved on a slope in south Dublin, that only became visible once someone looked at the landscape from the right angle.

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Pete F
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