Enclosure, Englishtown, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
In a field near Englishtown in County Wicklow, the earth holds the faint outline of something old, and the only way to see it is from the sky.
A bivallate circular enclosure, meaning a roughly circular area defined by two concentric banks or ditches, shows up not as visible earthworks but as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features subtly affect how grass or crops grow above them, producing variations in colour and density that become readable in aerial photographs. The enclosure is approximately thirty metres in diameter, a modest scale consistent with a domestic or agricultural site rather than a major ceremonial one.
The feature was identified from Google Earth aerial imagery, with a photograph dated 14 July 2018 providing the clearest record. Cropmarks of this kind are often easiest to detect in dry summers, when stressed vegetation above shallow buried features dries out faster than surrounding growth, making the pattern suddenly legible from altitude. The bivallate form, two lines of enclosure rather than one, is a characteristic found across early medieval Ireland, frequently associated with ringfort-type settlements where an inner bank defined a living or working space and an outer boundary provided additional enclosure for livestock or security. Whether this particular site dates to that period or to an earlier or later phase is not established from what is currently known about it.