Enclosure, Glasnamullen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a south-east-facing slope in Glasnamullen, County Wicklow, someone at some point in the past went to considerable trouble to level the ground before building anything at all.
That preliminary act of earthmoving is itself worth pausing over. Whatever this circular enclosure once was, it did not simply follow the natural contour of the hillside; it required a partly artificial platform to be created first, suggesting a degree of intent and effort that makes the absence of any surviving interior features all the more puzzling.
The enclosure is modest in scale, measuring around fifteen metres in diameter, and is defined by an earth and stone bank that has seen better days. The bank may originally have had small boulders arranged as inner and outer revetments, a form of facing designed to hold the earthwork in shape, though even that detail is now uncertain. What makes the site quietly strange is what it lacks: there is no identifiable entrance, no fosse (the ditch that typically accompanies a bank like this), and no sign of internal structures. The enclosure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, meaning it was visible and substantial enough to be recorded by the surveyors of that era, but its origins and purpose remain unclear. Circular enclosures of this general type occur across Ireland in a wide variety of historical contexts, from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial or funerary sites, and without further investigation it is impossible to say which tradition, if any, this one belongs to.