Enclosure, Ballylusk, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
On a south-west facing slope in County Wicklow, a large semi-circular earthwork curves across the hillside in a shape that no modern field boundary would ever produce.
Stretching roughly 220 metres from north-west to south-east and about 100 metres across, it is far too large and too carefully formed to be a casual accident of agricultural history, yet too little studied to carry a confident date or a name beyond the townland where it sits.
The enclosure is defined on its upslope sides by an earthen bank, between two and three metres wide and up to a metre high, fronted by an external ditch of similar width and up to a metre deep. On the south-east, the ditch runs into a deep natural gully, suggesting that whoever laid this boundary out was working with the landscape rather than against it, using existing features to supplement the labour of digging. The south-west side, running downslope, is simply absorbed into later field boundaries, and the earthwork gives no sign of continuing beyond them. That detail is telling: the modern fields appear to have fossilised the lower edge of whatever system this once was, preserving its ghost while obscuring its original extent. The most plausible interpretation is that this is a remnant of an upland land enclosure system that pre-dates the present field pattern, a way of organising or protecting grazing ground on the upper slopes before the countryside was subdivided into the more familiar small holdings of recent centuries.
