Double-bank enclosure, Ballyrory, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
At the foot of a north and west-facing slope in Ballyrory, County Wexford, a low circular earthwork sits quietly in the grass, its outline subtle enough that most people would walk past it without a second glance.
What makes it worth pausing over is its form: a double-banked enclosure, meaning it was originally defined by two concentric rings of raised earth rather than the single bank more commonly associated with Irish ringforts. The inner area measures roughly 35 metres across, and it is edged by a bank around six to seven metres wide and half a metre high, with an external fosse, a ditch, running outside it. That ditch, about six metres across at the top and 0.3 metres deep, disappears on the north-east to south-east arc, either eroded or never fully completed in that section. A clear entrance gap, around 4.5 metres wide, opens to the north-east.
The enclosure was already being recorded as a distinct feature in 1839, when it appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of Ireland, one of the most thorough cartographic exercises ever carried out in the country at that scale. The outer extent of the earthwork was noted then at approximately 60 metres in diameter, suggesting the double-bank arrangement was more legible in the nineteenth century than it is today. Vertical aerial photography later confirmed what ground-level observation might miss: from above, the concentric structure resolves into something coherent, a deliberate piece of landscape shaping rather than a natural rise in the field. The purpose of such enclosures remains open to interpretation; some are associated with settlement, others with stock management or territorial demarcation, and the presence of a formal entrance hints at a structure that was meant to be entered and exited in a controlled way.