Embanked enclosure, Lackensillagh, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Enclosures
On a south-to-north spur of land in Lackensillagh, County Waterford, an oval patch of grass sits quietly within what remains of an earthen enclosure, its edges defined not by dramatic walls but by a scarp, a slope cut into the ground, that drops from a barely perceptible ten centimetres on the western side to a full metre on the eastern, downhill edge. That difference in height tells you something about how the land works here: the enclosure was shaped to the spur, making use of natural elevation, and what now reads as a gentle landform was once a deliberately bounded space.
The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 recorded the feature as an oval embanked enclosure with external dimensions of roughly 55 metres north to south and 44 metres east to west, and it incorporated what appears to have been a road bank along its south-eastern to southern edge. The interior oval, as it survives on the ground, is somewhat smaller, measuring approximately 33 metres by 24 metres, suggesting that the outer earthworks have eroded or been obscured over time. Embanked enclosures of this type are found across Ireland and can date from prehistory through to the early medieval period, though without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a confident date to any individual example. A farm lane running east to west has cut through the southern end of the enclosure, truncating it by around 14 metres, which means the full circuit of the original boundary can no longer be traced on the southern side.