Enclosure, Money, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a gentle south-east-facing slope in the townland of Money, County Wicklow, there is an ancient enclosure that exists more as a cartographic fact than a physical one.
Roughly oval in shape and measuring approximately forty metres along its north-west to south-east axis and thirty metres across, it is the kind of site that rewards map-readers far more than walkers. At ground level, there is simply nothing to see.
The enclosure survives as a hachured outline on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the familiar system of short radiating lines that cartographers use to indicate earthwork features or slight changes in relief. That it was considered worth recording at all suggests it once had more definition, perhaps the remnant of a ringfort or an enclosed farmstead of early medieval date, the sort of settlement form that was once extremely common across Ireland but has been steadily erased by centuries of agriculture. Without excavation, its precise function and age remain open questions. What the map preserves is essentially a ghost, the trace of a boundary that has sunk back into the field.