Embanked enclosure, Dunmain, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
At Dunmain in County Wexford, an oval earthwork roughly fifty metres across from east to west and thirty-five metres from north to south was recorded on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map and then, apparently, forgotten by the landscape itself.
The enclosure no longer announces its presence in any visible way. A field bank running north to south now cuts straight through it, and the ground to either side lies under crops, root vegetables to the west and cereals to the east, leaving nothing legible at ground level.
Embanked enclosures of this kind are relatively common across Ireland, though their precise origins and purposes vary considerably. Some were associated with early medieval settlement, others with agricultural or pastoral use, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What makes this one quietly notable is its near-total disappearance. The 1839 Ordnance Survey mapping, one of the most thorough topographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, caught it at a moment when the earthwork was still readable in the terrain. At some point after that survey, field reorganisation introduced the bank that now bisects the site, and cultivation has since smoothed away whatever remained of the original earthen boundary. The enclosure survives now only as a set of coordinates and a faint oval outline on a nineteenth-century map sheet.