Enclosure, Lisheens, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
Some archaeological sites announce themselves with tumbled walls or grassy mounds.
This one, on a west-facing slope near Lisheens in County Wicklow, offers nothing of the sort. Walk across the ground and you would have no idea anything was there at all. The enclosure exists, in any meaningful sense, only from the air.
Aerial photography has revealed the faint outline of what appears to be a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres in diameter, itself enclosed within a larger outer rampart approximately fifty metres across. These features show up as cropmarks, a phenomenon where buried walls or ditches affect the growth of surface vegetation just enough to register differently in aerial imagery, creating ghostly rings or lines invisible to anyone standing among them. The inner and outer circuits together suggest a structure of some complexity, possibly a ringfort or a similarly enclosed settlement site of early medieval date, though the evidence is too slight to be certain. The west-facing slope on which it sits is a common enough choice for such enclosures, offering shelter and a view across lower ground.