Embanked enclosure, Kinnagh, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Kinnagh, Co. Wexford

In a scrubby field on a gentle south-facing slope in County Wexford, a circular earthwork quietly tells two different stories depending on which map you consult.

The Ordnance Survey's 1839 six-inch edition shows it as a neat circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across; by 1925, a later survey recorded something more irregular, a D-shaped feature stretching about 50 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south. Whether the ground itself changed, or whether earlier surveyors simply measured differently, the discrepancy is one of those small puzzles that makes old maps worth scrutinising.

Locally, the site was remembered as a circular area bounded by a low earthen bank and an outer fosse, the fosse being the defensive or demarcating ditch that typically accompanied such enclosures in early Irish landscape practice. That outer ditch was removed around 1984, effectively erasing one of the two elements that would have defined the monument to a passing eye. What remains is a scrub-covered area approximately 38 metres in diameter, and the fosse persists in a different register: it shows up as a wet, waterlogged strip of ground, the disturbed soil and former ditch-cut retaining moisture long after the earthwork itself was levelled. A test excavation carried out under licence reference 03E1448 confirmed the fosse's existence beneath re-deposited material, finding it to have been around six metres wide, a substantial cut for a feature now visible only as damp ground. The excavation findings were reported by McLoughlin in 2006. A stream runs roughly 100 metres to the south, flowing west to east, and its proximity may help explain why the filled ditch remains wet; drainage here has always moved slowly through the low slope.

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