Embanked enclosure, Carrigeen, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Ringforts
On a west-facing slope in Carrigeen, County Waterford, a low grass-covered bank curves quietly through the landscape, its semicircular outline hinting at a past that cartographers noticed but time has mostly obscured. What survives today is modest in scale, a bank roughly three metres wide and one metre high on both its inner and outer faces, tracing a diameter of approximately 32 metres from south to north. There is no visible fosse, the term for the ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks and whose absence here makes the site slightly harder to read at a glance.
The feature was already old enough to be worth recording when the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Waterford in 1840, and it appeared again on the 1926 edition of the same six-inch series, its semicircular form still legible from above. Embanked enclosures of this general type are found across Ireland and are associated with a broad range of functions and periods, from early medieval settlement and farming enclosures to earlier ritual or boundary uses. The original external diameter of this one was estimated at somewhere between 40 and 45 metres, suggesting that what remains today, though reasonably intact, represents a somewhat reduced version of the original earthwork, whether through natural erosion or centuries of agricultural activity on the surrounding land.