Embanked enclosure, Ballynabarney, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballynabarney, Co. Wexford

On the north-western slope of Annagh Hill in County Wexford, a circular patch of grass sits quietly within a double ring of earthen banks, and no one can say with certainty how anyone ever got inside.

There is no visible entrance, which is either a puzzle left by time or an indication that whatever opening once existed has long since been absorbed back into the hillside.

The enclosure is roughly 33.5 metres across at its widest east-west point. A central earthen bank, about four metres wide on the western side, rises only slightly on its inner face but reaches 1.2 metres on the exterior, giving it a more pronounced outward profile. Beyond it lies a fosse, the term used for the ditchlike depression cut to reinforce an earthwork, here about five metres wide at its top. A second, outer bank mirrors the dimensions of the first in width but sits lower on both sides. Together, the two banks and the fosse between them would have enclosed a space extending to perhaps fifty metres in overall diameter at its greatest extent. That outer bank has been largely destroyed along its south-eastern to south-western arc, which has erased much of the visual symmetry the structure once held. What survives sits on a ridge running broadly north-east to south-west, with the slope opening out to the north-west below it. Embanked enclosures of this kind appear across Ireland in various forms and periods, and their purposes range from ceremonial to agricultural to defensive, though assigning a specific function without excavation remains speculative.

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Pete F
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