Hilltop enclosure, Barranisky, Co. Wicklow

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Enclosures

Hilltop enclosure, Barranisky, Co. Wicklow

On a bracken-smothered hill in Barranisky, Co. Wicklow, something curving and deliberate shows up on aerial photography that simply will not reveal itself on the ground.

The feature in question is a possible hilltop enclosure, roughly 100 metres north to south and 110 metres east to west, sitting just off the summit on a steep north-facing slope. A low earthen bank is visible at the base of that slope, its position marked, almost incidentally, by a single coniferous tree. Beyond that, the dense bracken wins. The full arc of the enclosing earthwork cannot be traced on foot, and the outline does not appear on standard aerial photography at all, only partially on Digital Globe satellite imagery taken in April 2015.

What makes the site stranger still is the rock outcrop near the summit. Its north face appears to have been terraced or modified, and it is this modification, rather than any freestanding bank, that seems to form the enclosing element on the southern side of the monument as seen from the air. Hilltop enclosures of this kind are broadly understood as prehistoric or early medieval features, sometimes used for settlement, sometimes for purposes that remain genuinely unclear, and the landscape around Barranisky suggests long and layered human activity. A ringfort lies roughly 120 metres to the north-north-west, a cairn sits 70 metres to the south-south-east, and possible prehistoric field walls are some 60 metres to the south, the furthest of which doubles as the townland boundary with Glenteige. Whether all of these features are contemporary with one another is unknown, but together they point to a hillside that people kept returning to and reshaping over a very long period.

The site is difficult to assess in any season when the bracken is up, which in Ireland is most of the year. The single coniferous tree near the northern bank offers the most reliable ground-level marker, but tracing the full circuit of the enclosure from there remains, for now, a matter for aerial eyes rather than walking ones.

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Pete F
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