Enclosure, Rathmoon, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
At Rathmoon in County Wicklow, the outline of a circular enclosure survives not as a visible earthwork but as a ghost in the soil, legible only from above.
A partial cropmark, roughly 27 metres in diameter, shows up on aerial imagery, a faint arc traced by differences in how vegetation grows over buried features. Cropmarks of this kind form because buried ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding ground, causing crops or grass above them to grow taller or greener in dry conditions, effectively printing a map of what lies beneath onto the surface of a field.
The enclosure was identified from a Google Earth photograph taken in July 2018, when dry summer conditions would have drawn out exactly this kind of contrast. Circular enclosures of this scale are a common feature of the Irish landscape, and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about the date or function of this particular example. What adds a quiet layer of interest is its relationship to the wider landscape: a hilltop enclosure sits approximately 285 metres to the south-east, raising the possibility that these two features were part of the same pattern of activity across this part of Wicklow, though that too remains a matter of inference rather than established fact.