Enclosure, Umrygar, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In a pasture field in County Wicklow, a low earthwork traces an oval shape in the ground that most people would walk across without a second thought.
It rises no more than about twenty centimetres above the surrounding grass, spreads to a width of roughly five metres, and encloses an area measuring approximately forty-five metres on its longer axis and forty metres on the shorter. Easy to miss, easy to dismiss, and yet clearly the deliberate work of human hands.
Enclosures of this kind are among the more quietly puzzling features of the Irish landscape. The term covers a broad range of earthworks, from the substantial ringforts that served as defended farmsteads through the early medieval period to boundaries whose original purpose remains genuinely uncertain. The one at Umrygar falls at the modest end of the scale. Its oval plan and the relatively slight dimensions of its bank suggest age and erosion, centuries of ploughing, grazing, and weather gradually softening whatever profile it once had. What happened inside it, and when, remains unrecorded.
