Embanked enclosure, Knockmullin, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
On a south-east-facing slope in County Wexford, a circular earthwork roughly 55 metres across has been almost entirely swallowed by the landscape around it.
The only surface trace left is a slight curve in a field bank that also marks the townland boundary with Arnestown to the east. If you did not know what you were looking for, you would walk straight past it.
The enclosure was recorded on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means that by the time the OS surveyors came through, it was already old enough to be treated as a landscape feature worth noting rather than a working structure. An embanked enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular area defined by an earthen bank, could serve any number of purposes in earlier Irish centuries, from a farmstead enclosure to a ceremonial or ritual site. What can be said from the topography is that whoever used the site chose the position carefully. It sits on a slope looking out towards a col, a low pass or saddle between higher ground, approximately 300 metres to the south-east, with a north-east to south-west ridge about 500 metres to the north and Ballylane Hill around 1.2 kilometres to the south-west. That kind of placement, commanding a natural crossing point in the landscape, recurs at enclosures across Ireland and suggests the site was not chosen at random.