Enclosure, Whitestown (Uppercross By.), Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Enclosures
Somewhere beneath the lawns and driveways of a Dublin housing estate lies the ghost of a circular enclosure that has not been visible to the human eye for decades.
It exists now only in the archive, captured in a single aerial photograph taken in 1971, before the ground was broken for the houses that replaced it. That photograph, reference FSI 2 339/8, is essentially the sole surviving witness to what was once a distinct feature of the Whitestown landscape in the old barony of Uppercross.
The enclosure sat on the western bank of a stream, on a gentle slope facing roughly north-east. From the air, it appeared as a roughly circular earthwork, with an external diameter of around 40 metres, defined by a low bank or raised boundary. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and are typically associated with early medieval settlement, though the term covers a broad range of functions and periods. They are often referred to as ringforts when the enclosing element is an earthen bank, and they served variously as farmsteads, places of assembly, or enclosed settlements. The Uppercross barony, covering much of what is now south County Dublin, contains numerous such monuments, many of them long since absorbed into the expanding city. No excavation appears to have taken place at this particular site before development, so nothing more specific is known about its date or use beyond what the aerial image suggests.
There is nothing to see here now. The site is occupied by residential housing, and the earthwork is not visible at ground level. For anyone with an interest in the buried archaeology of suburban Dublin, the value lies not in visiting the spot itself but in consulting the aerial record held by the relevant heritage institutions. The 1971 photograph preserves what the landscape no longer does, a faint circular outline in the soil that hints at a much earlier pattern of life along a small, unremarkable stream in south County Dublin.