Embanked enclosure, Bricketstown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Bricketstown, Co. Wexford

A circular earthwork sitting on a low ridge in County Wexford is most clearly visible not to the eye on the ground, but as a mark on paper, recorded by Ordnance Survey cartographers nearly two centuries ago and then, effectively, swallowed by the fields around it.

When cereal crops have been harvested and the ground is bare, the enclosure at Bricketstown disappears entirely at ground level, leaving no obvious trace for the casual observer.

The site was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of roughly 50 to 55 metres. An embanked enclosure of this type is typically a roughly circular area of ground defined by a raised earthen bank, sometimes with an accompanying ditch, and such features in Ireland are associated with a broad range of periods and purposes, from early medieval settlement to ritual use in prehistory. By the time the 1924 edition of the same map was produced, the recorded external diameter had reduced to approximately 40 to 45 metres, a discrepancy that may reflect either physical erosion of the bank over the intervening decades or differences in how the two surveys were carried out. The enclosure sits on a broad but low north-south ridge, a modest piece of elevated ground that would nonetheless have offered a degree of visibility across the surrounding landscape. Archaeological testing carried out in 2008, roughly 60 metres to the north-west of the enclosure, produced no material that could be connected to it, and a second phase of work in 2009 reached a similar conclusion, leaving the enclosure's date and function unresolved.

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Pete F
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