Embanked enclosure, Cushenstown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Cushenstown, Co. Wexford

On a gently sloping field in Cushenstown, County Wexford, a raised oval platform sits quietly in the landscape, ringed by earthworks that most passers-by would take for a natural rise in the ground.

It is not. The oval, roughly 50 metres along its longer axis and 35 metres across, is defined by a deliberately constructed earthen bank and an external fosse, which is the term for a man-made ditch dug to reinforce or defend an enclosure. What survives is overgrown but coherent, and the geometry of the thing, once you begin to read it, is unmistakable.

The enclosure sits on a west-facing slope, with a small north-to-south stream running about 300 metres to the west, the kind of proximity to water that was rarely accidental in early Irish land use. The bank itself is most pronounced at the south-southwest, where it measures eight metres wide, rises a metre above the interior, and stands two metres above the exterior ground level. The fosse beyond it, curving from south-southeast to southwest, is still roughly half a metre deep with a top width of five and a half metres. At the southeast, a ramp two metres wide marks what was almost certainly the original entrance. Embanked enclosures of this kind are generally associated with early medieval Ireland, where they served any number of purposes, from enclosed farmsteads to more ceremonial or administrative functions, though the specific history of this particular example remains unrecorded.

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Pete F
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