Settlement cluster, Ballyremon Commons, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

Settlement cluster, Ballyremon Commons, Co. Wicklow

On an east to south-east-facing slope at Ballyremon Commons in County Wicklow, the ground holds the faint outline of a small farming community that has long since ceased to function as one.

Two subrectangular house foundations sit close together, their shapes still legible as low banks of earth and stone, each bank roughly one and a half metres wide and less than half a metre high. These are not the dramatic ruins of towers or abbeys, but the quiet, compressed remains of ordinary domestic life, the kind of settlement that once defined the Irish rural landscape and now tends to dissolve back into it.

The two houses, measuring approximately nine by five metres and eight by six metres respectively, were built side by side on the slope, the second sitting immediately north of the first. At some point after the houses were established, an irregular enclosure was added nearby, its north-west boundary cutting directly across the first structure, suggesting the enclosure came later and had little regard for, or knowledge of, what lay beneath. To the north-west of the houses, a rectangular field retains traces of ridge and furrow cultivation, a system whereby soil was mounded into parallel ridges to improve drainage and workable depth, particularly useful on marginal or damp ground. Part of a second field survives to the south-west, and further upslope to the west there are extensive areas that appear to have been cultivated without any formal enclosure around them, suggesting smallholders working land beyond whatever boundaries they maintained closer to home.

What makes this cluster quietly compelling is the layering. The cultivation remains, the house foundations, and the later enclosure together suggest a place that was used and reused across different periods, each generation leaving a partial imprint over the last. The slope orientation, facing the morning and midday sun, would have been a practical choice for anyone farming here, offering shelter and light in a part of Wicklow that can be unforgiving in poor weather. The site does not announce itself, and much of what survives amounts to low earthworks easily overlooked underfoot, but read carefully, the ground at Ballyremon Commons describes a working landscape in considerable detail.

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Pete F
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