Embanked enclosure, Ballykilty, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballykilty, Co. Wexford

There is a circle roughly forty-five metres across sitting in the low-lying farmland of Ballykilty, on the border where County Wexford meets County Wicklow, and the curious thing about it is that you cannot see it.

The enclosure lies beneath pasture, invisible at ground level, known only because someone recorded it on a map made nearly two centuries ago.

The evidence for it comes from the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most systematically detailed cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, which captured landscape features that have since vanished from view. The enclosure is circular, defined by an earthen bank, and its outline incorporates an existing NE-SW field bank at its north-western edge, as well as a stream running NW-SE along its north-east side, that same stream also serving as the county boundary. Embanked enclosures of this kind are found widely across Ireland, and while their origins and functions vary, many are associated with early medieval settlement, enclosing a farmstead or small agricultural community behind a raised earthwork. Whether that is the story here remains unconfirmed, but the form is consistent with that tradition. The landscape has since been absorbed into ordinary agricultural use, and whatever earthwork once defined the circle has levelled into the ground.

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