Embanked enclosure, Curraghduff, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Embanked enclosure, Curraghduff, Co. Wexford

Beneath a lawn on the southern slopes of Slievecoiltia Hill in County Wexford, a small rectangular earthwork sits entirely invisible, with no local memory of its existence.

No tradition survives, no folklore attaches to it, and to anyone walking across that grass today it registers as nothing at all. What we know of it comes almost entirely from a single source: the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded the outline of an embanked enclosure roughly 35 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and around 30 metres across, its corners constrained by straight field banks to the north-west and north-east.

The classification of this site has never been entirely settled. It appears in T. B. Barry's 1977 survey as a moated site, a category that typically refers to a later medieval enclosure, usually of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, where a raised platform was surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch, most often associated with manorial settlement in the Anglo-Norman period. But the dimensions here give pause. Moated sites tend to be larger, and the relatively compact area of this enclosure has led to the suggestion that it may instead have been a ringfort, the circular or sub-circular enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. Rectangular ringforts are less common but not unknown. The site sits on a gentle south-east-facing slope at the southern foothills of Slievecoiltia, a position that would suit either interpretation, offering reasonable drainage and prospect without any commanding elevation.

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