Enclosure, Priestsnewtown, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
At Priestsnewtown in County Wicklow, there is an archaeological enclosure that exists, in the most literal sense, only from the air.
Standing on the gentle south-facing slope where it lies, a visitor would see nothing at all. The ground gives nothing away. It is only when viewed from above, in the right conditions and at the right time of year, that the site reveals itself as a cropmark, the differential growth of crops above buried features betraying the outline of something long vanished beneath the surface.
What the aerial photograph shows is a circular enclosure roughly fifteen metres in diameter, defined by a fosse, which is simply a ditch cut into the ground, with what appears to be an entrance gap on the western side. A fosse of this kind, enclosing a roughly circular area, is a form found widely across Ireland and is typically associated with early medieval settlement, though enclosures of this type can span a considerable range of periods and functions. This particular example sits approximately one hundred metres south-east of a related enclosure, suggesting the two features may have formed part of the same broader landscape arrangement. The cropmark itself was captured in aerial photography held in the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, catalogue reference BDJ 101.
Because the site is invisible at ground level, there is no meaningful sense in which it can be visited in the conventional way. Its existence is essentially photographic and archival, a shape pressed into the earth and readable only through shadow and seasonal growth, as seen from above.