Embanked enclosure, Newtown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
On the south-eastern shore of Bannow Bay in County Wexford, a low earthen bank traces three sides of a near-rectangle in the scrub, while the fourth side has simply gone, eaten away by the sea.
What remains is an embanked enclosure, a type of earthwork defined by a raised perimeter bank rather than a dug ditch, and this particular example carries an extra layer of quiet strangeness: the bay itself has claimed part of its boundary, leaving a small cliff roughly a metre and a half high where the north-western wall once stood.
The enclosure was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, suggesting it was a visible and recognised feature of the landscape well before modern archaeological surveying began. At that point its external dimensions ran to approximately 70 metres on the north-east to south-west axis and between 30 and 40 metres across. What survives on the ground today is somewhat smaller, measuring around 53 metres by 30 metres, the difference almost certainly explained by ongoing coastal erosion along the Bannow Bay shoreline. The earthen bank that defines the remaining three sides is between four and five metres wide and stands between 1.5 and 1.8 metres high, which makes it a substantial feature despite its scrub-covered, easy-to-miss appearance. There is no fosse, the term for the external ditch that typically accompanies such enclosures, and a single entrance gap roughly 5.5 metres wide breaks the south-western side. The enclosure sits at the foot of a north-west-facing slope, tucked against the bay in a position that feels less like a commanding promontory and more like a deliberate sheltering. Its date and original function remain unrecorded.