Enclosure, Ringknock, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ringknock, Co. Wexford

Stand in the pasture at Ringknock in County Wexford and you would see nothing unusual beneath your feet.

The ground is level, the grass unremarkable. Yet from the air, a circular enclosure roughly eighteen metres across emerges as a cropmark, that tell-tale phenomenon where buried archaeology causes the vegetation above it to grow differently, revealing outlines invisible to anyone standing at ground level. The enclosure exists, in a very real sense, only when viewed from above.

What makes this site particularly interesting is its relationship to its neighbours. The circular enclosure appears to be attached to a ring-ditch lying just to its north-east, with a separate enclosure site roughly fifteen metres to its west. A ring-ditch is typically the surviving trace of a prehistoric burial monument, often a round barrow whose raised mound has long since been ploughed or weathered flat, leaving only the surrounding ditch as a faint signature in the soil. The clustering of these features suggests this corner of Wexford preserves a small complex of related prehistoric activity, the kind of landscape detail that only becomes legible when aerial photography is brought to bear on otherwise featureless farmland.

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Pete F
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