Embanked enclosure, Bryanstown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
In the fields around Bryanstown in County Wexford, a circular enclosure roughly sixty metres across once shaped the landscape enough to be recorded on a map, then quietly vanished from view.
By the time anyone looked for it on the ground, it had largely ceased to exist as a physical feature, surviving instead as something only visible from above, and only under the right conditions.
The enclosure appeared on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which makes it one of the earlier large-scale cartographic records of the Irish countryside, produced at a time when many earthworks that have since been ploughed or eroded were still legible on the surface. That original survey noted an external diameter of around sixty metres, placing it in a size range consistent with early medieval enclosures of various kinds, though its precise date and function remain unestablished. By the time aerial photography became a tool for archaeological prospection, the bank itself had gone, but the enclosure left behind a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features affect the growth of crops above them differently from the surrounding soil, producing a visible ring or outline when seen from altitude. The cropmark diameter recorded from aerial photographs is approximately thirty-five metres, somewhat smaller than the mapped feature, which may reflect the difference between the outer bank edge and the interior circuit. The site sits on a slight east-facing slope, a positioning common among enclosures of probable early historic date in Ireland, though the reasons for that preference are not fully understood.
