Enclosure, Toberlomina, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Toberlomina, Co. Wexford

Beneath a gently rolling field in Toberlomina, County Wexford, a large D-shaped enclosure lies invisible to anyone walking past it, yet perfectly legible from the air.

The feature survives only as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression left in growing vegetation when buried ditches or earthworks alter how crops absorb moisture and nutrients overhead. What appears from ground level as an ordinary agricultural field resolves, from above, into a distinct geometric shape: a roughly D-form measuring approximately 45 metres west-north-west to east-south-east and about 40 metres north-north-east to south-south-west, with notably straight edges along its northern and southern sides.

The enclosure is defined by two parallel fosses, that is, ditches, set roughly five metres apart, suggesting a double-ditched boundary of the kind sometimes associated with early medieval settlement or enclosure activity in Ireland, though the site has not been excavated and no firm date has been assigned. Its eastern side is truncated by a later north-south field bank, which cuts across the feature and obscures whatever originally closed the form on that side. The cropmark was first reported by Simon Dowling, and it became visible in satellite imagery captured in July 2018, when dry summer conditions brought the buried archaeology to the surface in the patterns of the crops above it. This kind of discovery, made not through fieldwork but through careful attention to aerial and satellite photographs, is increasingly how previously unrecorded sites are being identified across the Irish countryside.

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Pete F
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