Walk across the harvested cereal ground at Curraghmore in County Wexford and there is nothing obvious to stop you, nothing to mark where something once stood or was deliberately bounded. Yet that small arc of earthwork, perhaps 24 metres of it running north-east to south, is the surviving remnant of a feature that was still legible enough in 1839 to be recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

Embanked enclosures of this type are found across Ireland and their origins and purposes vary considerably. Some are prehistoric ritual sites, others are early medieval in character, and many remain difficult to date without excavation. What they share is a low earthen bank, sometimes with an accompanying ditch, enclosing a roughly circular area. The Curraghmore example sits at the crest of a west-facing slope on a broad, low ridge running north to south, a position that is typical of how such features were sited, taking modest advantage of elevated ground without commanding any dramatic height. By the time the nineteenth-century surveyors noted it, the enclosure was apparently still clear enough in the landscape to be mapped with some confidence. In the time since, agriculture has reduced it to almost nothing.