Embanked enclosure, Ballydermody, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballydermody, Co. Waterford

Somewhere on a gentle north-east-facing slope in Ballydermody, County Waterford, a pair of concentric earthen banks quietly encloses a roughly circular patch of ground, and nobody knows how you were originally supposed to get inside. That absence, the missing entrance, is one of the more quietly unsettling features of this embanked enclosure. Without it, the structure resists easy interpretation, sitting somewhere between a ringfort, a ceremonial enclosure, and something harder to name.

The inner space is subcircular, measuring approximately 27.5 metres east-west and 26.5 metres north-south, and is defined by an earth and stone bank roughly 2.5 metres wide. Between that inner bank and a second, outer bank lies a berm, a flat level platform of ground, here about 9 metres across. Berms of this kind are sometimes found in more elaborate ringforts and enclosures, where they may have served a defensive or delineating function, though their precise purpose is rarely certain. The outer bank, narrower at around 2.1 metres wide and covered in scrub, retains stone-facing along part of its north-east to south-south-east arc, and along another stretch has been absorbed into a later field boundary. There is no visible fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such banks in defensive or settlement contexts, which further complicates any straightforward reading of the site's original function. The inner bank stands taller on its interior face than its exterior, a detail that suggests the enclosed area, now grass-covered, was the focus of whatever activity once took place here.

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Pete F
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