Embanked enclosure, Ballybrack, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballybrack, Co. Wexford

On a north-west-facing slope in Ballybrack, County Wexford, there is a circular earthwork that has been slowly disappearing into the landscape for centuries.

What survives today is roughly 27 metres across, ringed by the remnants of a flat-bottomed fosse, which is the term for a ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary perimeter. The fosse is best preserved along its eastern to south-western arc, where it still measures up to 8 metres wide at the top and retains an internal depth of around 1.2 metres. An outer bank survives to the east-south-east, standing about 0.8 metres high. The western and northern portions of both bank and fosse have been cut away by a later field boundary running north-east to south-west, and scrub has colonised much of what remains.

The enclosure appears on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is shown with a considerably larger external diameter of roughly 65 to 70 metres, bisected by a north-west to south-east lane. That lane has since vanished entirely, leaving no trace on the ground. Attached to the south of the main enclosure is a rectangular scrub-covered area, approximately 30 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, defined by a shallow fosse of its own. Its origins are ambiguous: it may be a genuine annexe to the enclosure, or it may simply be what is left of a narrow field that can be seen on the earlier Ordnance Survey mapping, with dimensions of roughly 50 by 20 metres. The gap between what the 1839 map recorded and what now exists on the ground is itself part of the interest here. A site that once appeared substantial enough to warrant a lane cutting through its centre has contracted, in visible terms, to something much more modest, its former extent legible only through old cartography.

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Pete F
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