What is an enclosure (prehistoric and romano-british)?

What an enclosure (prehistoric and romano-british) is

Enclosures range from small farmsteads with a single bank and ditch around a few round houses to larger settlements with several circuits of bank, and they may be curvilinear, rectilinear or irregular in plan. Banjo enclosures are a distinctive Iron Age type, found mainly in Wessex and the upper Thames valley: a small enclosure, usually under 0.4 hectares, reached by a long entrance passage between parallel ditches; over 200 are recorded, mostly of Middle Iron Age date. In south-west Wales a survey grant-aided by Cadw recorded 787 defended settlements in Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, including 562 definite or possible defended enclosures as well as hillforts and promontory forts. Without excavation, the date and purpose of an enclosure, whether settlement, stock pen or ceremonial site, is often uncertain.

How enclosure (prehistoric and romano-british)s look on LiDAR

An enclosure that survives as an earthwork shows as a closed circuit of bank and ditch with one or more entrance gaps, enclosing a level interior that may contain the circular platforms of round houses. Sky-view factor shows the ditch as a dark ring and a local relief model shows the bank and internal platforms, while on slopes positive and negative openness separate the bank from the ditch. Many lowland enclosures have been levelled by ploughing and are known only from cropmarks, while upland and woodland examples often survive as earthworks.

See LiDAR visualisations explained for what each method shows.

What can look like one

Post-medieval stock pens and sheepfolds, tree-planting rings, banks around ponds, medieval ringworks and small hillforts can look similar. Henges differ in having the ditch inside the bank.

Protection

Many well-preserved enclosures are scheduled monuments, protected in England by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 and in Wales by the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2023.

Examples on the LiDAR

Where they are

Counties with the most enclosure (prehistoric and romano-british)s that have a page here.

More examples