Copse, Ballinacarrig, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Copse, Ballinacarrig, Co. Wexford

On the southern slope of Tara Hill in County Wexford, what the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded simply as a small copse turns out to be something considerably older and more deliberately shaped.

The trees and scrub that once gave the feature its unassuming name have thinned enough to reveal what lies beneath: a near-circular enclosure roughly 37 metres across, its perimeter formed by an earthen bank still standing between 0.6 and 1.3 metres high, faced on the outside with stone cladding and accompanied by a fosse, the external ditch that typically ran around defensive or ceremonial earthworks of this kind. What makes the site quietly peculiar is the absence of any identifiable entrance. A bank with no gap, no causeway, no worn threshold, raises obvious questions about how, or indeed whether, people were ever meant to pass through it in the conventional sense.

By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1839, the enclosure had already been so thoroughly colonised by vegetation that surveyors simply noted a copse and moved on. The earthwork itself is considerably more ancient, though the notes attach no firm date to it. What can be said is that the combination of a rounded bank, external stone facing, and an outer fosse is consistent with the kind of enclosed sites, whether ringforts, ceremonial enclosures, or something in between, that dot the Irish landscape from the early medieval period and earlier. A possible standing stone lies roughly 30 metres to the east-south-east, which may or may not be coincidental. Standing stones, single upright slabs whose original purpose ranges from boundary markers to ritual monuments, are frequently found in loose association with enclosures, and the proximity here is at least suggestive, even if no firm connection can be drawn.

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