Embanked enclosure, Mountnebo, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Mountnebo, Co. Wexford

On a spur of Slievebaun in County Wexford, an oval earthwork sits inside a coniferous forest with no visible entrance and, until recently, no particular acknowledgement from the landscape around it.

That absence of a doorway is one of the quietly puzzling things about this enclosure: whatever it enclosed, whatever came and went through it, has left no obvious trace of how. The earthen bank that defines the oval measures between two and three metres wide, and the external fosse, a V-shaped ditch running around the outside, is shallow but deliberate, the kind of feature that takes sustained effort to cut and maintain.

The enclosure sits just off the south-facing crest at the eastern end of a west-east ridge, a position that suggests its builders were thinking carefully about the terrain. It measures roughly 59 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west, though earlier mapping recorded it as approximately circular with an external diameter of around 70 metres, a discrepancy that points to how differently a monument reads depending on whether you are standing inside it, flying above it, or tracing it from a paper map. The 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map is the only historical cartographic source to mark it, placing it within what was then woodland. A rath, the remains of a roughly circular earthen enclosure of the kind associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, lies about 200 metres to the east, suggesting this corner of Wexford saw sustained activity across a long period. By 2005, aerial photography showed the forestry had been cleared and a road cut east to west directly through the enclosure. Later imagery confirmed it had been left unplanted in the replanted forest, preserved as a gap in the trees rather than recorded on the ground in any formal way.

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Pete F
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