Enclosure, Slievecorragh, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On the slopes of Slievecorragh in County Wicklow, a small oval enclosure has been cut directly into the hillside, its builders choosing to work with the contours of the land rather than seek out level ground.
That decision, deliberate and practical, gives the structure an oddly purposeful quality. Measuring roughly eleven metres east to west and just over nine metres north to south, it sits on a steep south and south-westerly facing slope, oriented to catch whatever warmth the sky offered.
The enclosure is defined by a drystone wall, a construction technique using dry-laid stone without mortar, which survives to a height of around forty-five centimetres and ranges between seventy centimetres and just over a metre in width. What makes it particularly worth attention is the southern section of the wall, where rectangular blocks of stone have been set radially, that is, arranged like the spokes of a wheel fanning outward from a central point, rather than laid in the more usual horizontal courses. This is not a casual detail. It suggests a builder who understood the specific structural demands of working on a slope, using the geometry of the stonework itself to manage the pressure of the hillside behind it. The enclosure was scarped into the ground, meaning the slope was cut back to create a flat or sheltered platform, a labour-intensive approach that implies the site had real value to whoever made it, whether as a dwelling, an animal pen, or something else the archaeology has not yet settled.