Enclosure, Moneycross, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
On a south-facing slope near Moneycross in County Wexford, something rectangular and long-buried is giving itself away, not to the eye on the ground, but to a satellite passing overhead.
A cropmark enclosure, roughly twenty metres across, shows up in aerial imagery as a ghostly outline in the soil, its shape betrayed by the differential growth of whatever crop or grass happens to be growing above it. Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or walls affect the moisture available to plants above them, causing subtle but visible variations in colour and height that are invisible at ground level but legible from altitude. What makes this particular site quietly interesting is that it does not appear in any mapped record; it surfaced only when someone thought to look carefully at satellite data.
The enclosure is defined by a single narrow fosse, the term for a shallow ditch used to demarcate or defend a bounded area, and attached to the southern end of its north-eastern side is a smaller rectangular feature, about seven metres across, outlined by similarly faint fosses. That smaller enclosure sits alongside the trace of a field drain running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, a drain that does not appear on any modern map but corresponds to the field system recorded on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of the area. That connection suggests the drain, and possibly the enclosures themselves, belonged to an organised agricultural landscape that was already old by the time the first systematic mapping of Ireland was carried out in the nineteenth century. The site was first reported by Faith Bailey, identified through Google Earth imagery captured in July 2018.