Embanked enclosure, Rathmacknee Little, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
In the flat, low-lying farmland of south County Wexford, a modest rise in the ground holds something quietly anomalous: a near-perfect circle of mixed woodland, roughly fifty metres across, sitting slightly above the surrounding fields as though the earth has been deliberately gathered up beneath it.
The elevation is not dramatic, but in a landscape this level, even a gentle hillock draws the eye.
What gives the site its archaeological interest is the earthwork that defines its edge. A scarp, essentially a steep sloping face cut into or built up from the natural ground, runs around the perimeter, rising to around two metres on the southern side. On the western arc, traces of a bank survive, about six metres wide, with an external height of over two metres, though its inner face is considerably lower. There is no visible fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such banks in Irish prehistoric and early medieval enclosures, which makes the site slightly harder to read than a more textbook example. A narrow entrance, just over two metres wide, opens at the south-west. Taken together, these features describe an embanked enclosure, a broadly circular defined space whose original purpose is not recorded. Such enclosures in Ireland range from early medieval farmsteads and ceremonial sites to features of uncertain, possibly prehistoric, date. This one has not yielded a clear answer.
The woodland growing across the raised platform today both preserves and obscures the earthwork. Tree roots can be hard on buried archaeology, but the absence of agriculture inside the boundary has almost certainly protected whatever survives beneath the surface. The scarp is most pronounced at the south, and that south-western entrance gap, narrow but legible, is the detail that confirms the whole thing was once a deliberately shaped and bounded space rather than a natural accident of topography.