Embanked enclosure, Ballynevoga, Co. Waterford

Somewhere in the pasture fields of Ballynevoga, a circular earthwork roughly fifty metres across lies completely invisible to anyone standing in the field above it. No bank rises from the grass, no depression marks the perimeter, and nothing announces that there is anything here at all. Yet this enclosure was real enough to be recorded by the surveyors who produced the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1840, who marked it clearly as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of somewhere between fifty and fifty-five metres.

Embanked enclosures of this general type are among the more enigmatic features of the Irish countryside. They are broadly similar in form to ring forts, which were enclosed farmsteads used from the early medieval period onwards, though without more investigation it is impossible to say with confidence what purpose this particular example served or when it was built. What the 1840 map record does confirm is that by the time those surveyors came through County Waterford, the enclosure was already sufficiently reduced that it had to be captured on paper rather than simply observed. The level, unbroken pasture that now covers the site has done the rest, leaving the earthwork to survive, if it survives at all, only below the turf.