Enclosure, Baylestown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Enclosure, Baylestown, Co. Wexford

On the east-facing slope of a ridge in County Wexford, there is a circular earthwork with no recognisable entrance.

That detail alone sets it apart from the more familiar ringforts scattered across the Irish countryside, where a gap in the bank typically marks the way in. Whatever this enclosure was built for, the usual logic of coming and going does not seem to have applied.

The structure sits towards the lower end of a north-north-west to south-south-east ridge at Baylestown, defined by an earthen bank and an external fosse, a flat-bottomed ditch that runs around its outer edge. The bank survives best at the north and south, where it reaches an external height of around 1.8 metres and a width of between six and seven and a half metres. The interior measures roughly 27 metres across. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up in 1839, the feature was recorded as somewhat larger, at around 60 metres in diameter, suggesting that either the surrounding ground has shifted considerably in the intervening period or that the earlier surveyors were capturing something now lost. The interior is covered in grass and fern, giving little away about what, if anything, lies beneath the surface.

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Pete F
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