Enclosure, Ballybrack More, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
At Ballybrack More in County Wicklow, beside an ordinary working farmyard, there sits a low earthen bank that most people would walk past without a second thought.
It curves in a rough subrectangle, two metres wide and rising to about 1.3 metres at its highest point, faced with drystone work and set on a footing of boulders. One side has been partly removed over the years, and there is what may be an original entrance at the northern end. It is easy to mistake for a field boundary or a collapsed wall, but its form and construction place it in a different category entirely.
Enclosures of this kind are among the more ambiguous features in Irish archaeology. The drystone-facing over an earthen core is a construction technique with a long history in rural Ireland, used for everything from ceremonial ringforts to purely functional enclosures around livestock. At Ballybrack More, the working interpretation is a practical one: the structure was most likely a paddock or small field, a place to contain animals or divide land rather than to mark territory in any grander sense. That reading is supported by its position on level ground directly beside the farmyard, which would have made it convenient for day-to-day agricultural use. What it cannot tell us, without further investigation, is precisely when it was built or by whom.