Ring-ditch, Kilpoole, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Kilpoole, Co. Wicklow

Close to the Wicklow coast, in a field that gives no outward sign of anything unusual, the soil conceals the ghost of a circular enclosure roughly twelve metres across.

It cannot be seen by walking the ground. The only way to know it is there is from the air, where the buried fosse, a ditch that once defined the perimeter, betrays itself as a cropmark, a faint difference in how the vegetation above it grows and colours depending on the season and the weather. The landscape keeps the secret well.

The feature at Kilpoole is thought to be a ploughed-out ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial mound was originally surrounded by a circular ditch. Centuries of agriculture have levelled the mound entirely, leaving only the ditch below the plough-line to record that something was once here. What makes this particular site notable is that it does not stand alone. It forms part of a large complex of at least seven related ring-ditches spread across the same area of level coastal ground, with a further example sitting roughly thirty metres to the south-west. That kind of clustering suggests the site was once a significant place in the prehistoric landscape of this part of Wicklow, used over time by communities for whom this stretch of coast held particular meaning, though the precise period and the people behind it remain unspecified in the available record.

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Pete F
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