Embanked enclosure, Ballindaggan, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballindaggan, Co. Wexford

On a gently sloping hillside in County Wexford, a nearly perfect grass-covered circle sits quietly in the landscape, its origins and purpose unrecorded in any surviving document.

Roughly forty metres across, it is defined by an earthen bank that has grown over with vegetation across its northern, eastern, and southern arcs, while a scarp, essentially a cut or drop in the ground surface, takes over along the eastern and southern stretches. A shallow ditch, known in archaeological terminology as a fosse, runs along the south-western exterior, and a gap four metres wide in the north-east marks what was almost certainly the original entrance. The whole thing is ordinary-looking enough to pass unnoticed, which is perhaps why it remains so poorly understood.

Embanked enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland, and they resist easy classification. Some are early medieval in date and served as farmsteads or enclosures for livestock; others are earlier still and may have had ceremonial functions. The dimensions here, approximately 41.5 metres north to south and 40.3 metres east to west, fall comfortably within the range associated with ringforts, the enclosed settlements that were the basic unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland. The bank, still between 1.5 and 2 metres high externally in places and nearly seven metres wide at its base, would once have been a more imposing boundary than it appears today. The combination of bank, fosse, and scarp suggests a site that was carefully engineered, even if the soil and grass have long since softened its edges into something that looks almost natural.

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