Enclosure, Moneystown, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a gentle slope in Moneystown, County Wicklow, there is a small circular earthwork that nobody can quite agree on.
Barely five metres across internally, it sits on grazing land with open views to the north-east, enclosed by a low earthen bank that rises no more than forty centimetres on its highest side. Gorse, hawthorn, and a copper beech have colonised it thoroughly enough to make any confident reading of the ground almost impossible.
The uncertainty is the point. The bank, which ranges from two and a half to three and a half metres wide, could mark the edge of a ring-barrow, a type of burial monument in which a mound or flat central area is surrounded by a circular bank, common across Ireland and Britain from the Bronze Age onward. Equally, it might be the remnant of a hut site, a much more domestic origin entirely. Scattered stone found at the perimeter and inside the enclosure is thought to be dumped field clearance material rather than structural evidence either way, which leaves the question open. Locally, the place is called a raheen, a term derived from the Irish word for a small fort or enclosure, and one that tends to be applied informally to any small, circular, earthwork feature whose original purpose has become obscure over time.
The site sits on a slope with average to good grazing around it, the kind of unremarkable agricultural land that has absorbed, buried, and half-erased countless features over centuries. Without excavation, or at least without clearing the present undergrowth, its true character remains genuinely undetermined, which is itself a fairly honest summary of how many such small earthworks across rural Ireland persist: noticed, named in the local memory, but not fully understood.
