Embanked enclosure, Ballyrahan, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballyrahan, Co. Wexford

There is something quietly disorienting about a monument that appears on a nineteenth-century map but leaves no impression whatsoever on the ground beneath your feet.

At the northwestern base of Creagh Hill in County Wexford, a circular embanked enclosure roughly 35 metres in external diameter was recorded on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, positioned at the southwestern edge of a small wood. Walk the site today and there is nothing to see; the earth gives nothing away.

The enclosure belongs to a broader category of circular earthworks found across Ireland, related in form to the rath, a type of enclosed farmstead typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and associated with early medieval settlement. What makes this particular example stranger is the gap between the mapped record and physical reality. Aerial photography has located a cropmark, the faint signature a buried feature leaves on growing crops when soil moisture or density differs along its line, of a circular enclosure about 30 metres to the northeast of where the OS map places it. The cropmark reveals a single fosse, that is, a ditch, forming a roughly circular outline approximately 35 metres across, with what appears to be an entrance gap on the northeastern side. This is almost certainly the monument, displaced slightly from its mapped position, perhaps through imprecise surveying in 1839 or subtle drift in how the feature was interpreted from the air versus the ground. Two further raths lie nearby, one immediately to the north and another around 90 metres to the northwest, suggesting this part of the ridge at Ballyrahan was once a notably occupied or organised piece of landscape.

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