Enclosure, Maxboley, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Maxboley, Co. Wexford

In a field at Maxboley in County Wexford, there is an archaeological site that has never been excavated, never been walked over by a surveyor with a clipboard, and quite possibly never been noticed by anyone passing along the road.

It exists, as far as current knowledge goes, only as a pattern in a crop, visible from satellite imagery taken on a single April day in 2021.

What the imagery reveals is an oval enclosure, roughly 55 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, traced by a slight fosse, which is simply a shallow ditch, cut into the ground on a gentle south-west-facing slope. The ditch appears to fade or disappear entirely along the south-east to south-west arc, leaving the enclosure incomplete in outline, though whether that gap is original or simply a result of soil conditions affecting crop growth is impossible to say without groundwork. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried features alter the moisture or nutrient content of the soil above them, causing whatever is growing in the field to develop differently, taller or shorter, greener or more parched, in ways that become legible from altitude even when nothing is visible at ground level. The site was first identified and reported by Jean Charles Caillére, whose aerial or satellite observation brought this otherwise unrecorded enclosure into the archaeological record for the first time.

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