Enclosure, Inchanappa, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Enclosures
When road-building work for the N11 Ballynabarney-Newtownmountkennedy realignment cut through farmland at Inchanappa South in County Wicklow in 2002, it exposed something that had been quietly buried in the subsoil for centuries.
At the centre of the excavation, which ran from late February to mid-April of that year, was a bivallate enclosure, meaning a roughly circular or oval enclosed space defined by two concentric ditches cut into the subsoil rather than built up above ground. These kinds of enclosures are found across Ireland in various forms and periods, and they served purposes ranging from settlement to ritual, though the precise function of any given example often remains open to debate.
The enclosure at Inchanappa, designated WI025-067, gave up its contents gradually. A formal entranceway on the south-east side was defined by two parallel rows of three posts set about two metres apart, orientated north-west to south-east. Inside, in the north-western area, excavators found the remnants of a circular structure, identified by ten pits and post-holes arranged in a rough circle, with faint traces of what may have been a slot-trench running around the outside. Two saddle querns, the flat stone platforms used for grinding grain by hand, were recovered from post-holes associated with this structure, suggesting domestic or agricultural use at some point in the site's life. A second, more puzzling feature occupied the southern portion of the enclosure: thirteen post-holes and two pits spread across an area of roughly nine by ten metres, with no clear pattern, though archaeologists considered it possibly structural. Beyond the enclosure itself, other areas of the site were less revealing. A post-medieval pit dump contained red bricks, roof slates, and ceramics, and a separate subrectangular pit elsewhere yielded pottery sherds and flint debitage, the small waste flakes left over from knapping flint tools. A hearth on the hillside showed evidence of at least two phases of use, though it produced no datable material.

