Enclosure, Liscolman, Co. Wicklow

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Liscolman, Co. Wicklow

A circular mark in a farmer's field, visible only from above and only under the right conditions, is sometimes all that survives of an ancient enclosure.

At Liscolman in County Wicklow, aerial imagery has revealed exactly this: a cropmark tracing a roughly circular area approximately 18 metres in diameter on a low ridge about 250 metres east of the Derreen River, itself a tributary of the River Slaney. Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as ditches or walls, affect how plants grow above them, causing subtle differences in colour or height that become legible from altitude. The enclosure itself has not been excavated, and subsurface archaeological deposits may still survive intact beneath the pasture and tillage.

What makes the Liscolman site particularly striking is not the enclosure alone but its immediate company. Within a stretch of ground roughly 140 metres long, aerial imagery identifies four distinct monuments clustered together. Approximately 20 metres to the south-south-west lies a second enclosure, and about 13 metres beyond that, a burial mound. Just 10 metres to the north-north-east, a standing stone is visible. The grouping was brought to attention by Jean-Charles Caillere, who identified it through Google Earth imagery dated July 2021, corroborated by earlier MapGenie aerial photographs from 2004 to 2006. The density of monuments in such a compressed area suggests this modest ridge held some sustained significance in the past, whether as a place of burial, boundary-marking, or ritual activity, even if the precise nature and date of that significance remain unknown.

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