Enclosure, Westown, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Enclosures
In an arable field on the northern fringes of County Dublin, just shy of the old boundary with Meath, there is an enclosure that has never been excavated, never been signposted, and until recently had a later field boundary cutting straight through it.
What we know of it comes almost entirely from above, through the faint signatures that buried ditches leave in ripening crops, read from satellite imagery rather than the ground.
Cropmarks, the slight variations in crop colour and growth caused by buried features affecting soil moisture and nutrients, revealed a subcircular enclosure here when Apple Maps coverage was examined in June 2018, the work compiled by Tom Condit. The enclosure is roughly 38 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, defined by a ditch approximately 3 metres wide. No gap is clearly visible through the ditch, which is an unusual detail; most enclosed settlement sites of this kind have at least one identifiable entrance. Three smaller, roughly rectangular enclosures extend from the eastern perimeter of the main one, suggesting an organised arrangement of associated spaces, perhaps for animals or agricultural use, though without excavation any interpretation remains provisional. The site sits around 818 metres south-east of the Delvin River, which has long marked the line between Dublin and Meath, and about 600 metres from a known barrow, one of those low earthen burial mounds that appear periodically across this part of the country. A field boundary, cleared sometime after 2012, once bisected the site on a north-west to south-east line, a reminder that agricultural activity has been quietly reshaping these landscapes for centuries.
The enclosure lies towards the north-western edge of its field, and there is no public access to the site itself. The most instructive way to examine it remains the same as how it was first properly identified: through aerial or satellite imagery, where, in the right season and light conditions, the ghost of the ditch and its attached enclosures can still be traced in the crop.