Ring-ditch, Irishtown (Castleknock By.), Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Ritual/Ceremonial
There is an ancient circle buried in a working arable field in north County Dublin that nobody walking past would ever notice.
It does not announce itself with a mound, a standing stone, or a fence around it. The only way to see it, practically speaking, is from the air, or from a satellite image taken on a clear June day. What gives it away is a cropmark, the faint but legible difference in how grain or grass grows above disturbed soil, tracing out a circular ditch that has been invisible at ground level for an unknown number of centuries.
A ring-ditch is exactly what the name suggests: a roughly circular trench, usually cut into the ground and left without a causeway or entrance break, which enclosed a space that was most likely ceremonial or funerary in purpose during prehistoric times. This particular example sits on an alluvial terrace about 190 metres south of the Ward River, on land that was once associated with Irishtown House, a now-demolished residence that stood around 440 metres to the southwest. The house is gone, the field boundaries that once subdivided the area have been extensively levelled, and the ring-ditch itself was recorded from an aerial photograph taken in the early 1990s by Dr. Gillian Barret, which showed a circular cropmark with an external diameter of roughly 18 metres. More recent Google Earth coverage from 24 June 2018 resolved it further, showing a feature approximately 12.6 metres across, defined by a ditch about 2 metres wide, with no evidence of any entrance gap. A second ring-ditch lies around 267 metres to the west-southwest, and fragments of other linear features are visible in the surrounding field, suggesting the area has a longer and more complicated archaeological story than its surface would suggest.
The field lies to the west of the M2 motorway, which means the site sits in that slightly ambiguous zone between Dublin's suburban edge and open farmland. There is nothing to see from the roadside or on foot; the ground is level and gives nothing away. The cropmark is best appreciated through aerial or satellite imagery, and the Google Earth coverage from June 2018 is detailed enough to make the circular ditch clearly legible. Anyone with a serious interest in the site would do well to cross-reference it with the nearby ring-ditch to the west, since the proximity of two such features within a few hundred metres of each other may indicate that this stretch of the Ward River valley held some significance in the prehistoric landscape that has otherwise left no trace above ground.