A fine complex of crop marks currently visible in the northern part of the Brú na Bóinne landscape, pictured from my drone.
The first photo above shows unrecorded features in the townland of Littlegrange, close to the Mattock River. I have reported these to the National Monuments Service and am waiting on word as to what they might be. The interesting feature here is a possible relict laneway/droveway leading to a D-shaped enclosure on the left. The almost-vertical lines in this image are most likely former field boundaries. The other markings might be related to geomorphology.
The second photo shows two recorded 'enclosures' close together in the same townland, originally identified in a Cambridge University (CUCAP) aerial photo taken in 1967, and captured in more recent years by Ken Williams using a drone.
The third photo is a vertical drone image of the easternmost of those two enclosures, which reveals quite a lot of interesting detail. The enclosure consists of two subcircular ditches, the inner one much wider and more obvious as a positive (dark) cropmark. The outer enclosure is much thinner. Is this an early medieval ringfort, or something else? It fits the size for a ringfort - the outer enclosure is c.42m in diameter.
These features are situated just 1.6 miles (2.6km) north of Newgrange monument. They demonstrate something we already know about the Brú na Bóinne landscape - it was inhabited from early Neolithic times, right through prehistory and into historic and medieval times, and of course the land is used for tillage and pasture by farmers today.
