Embanked enclosure, Mylerspark, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Mylerspark, Co. Wexford

At Mylerspark in County Wexford, a low and overgrown earthwork sits quietly on the lower slope of a steep west-facing hillside, its purpose and age still somewhat uncertain.

Roughly D-shaped, it measures around 32 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, and is defined by a modest bank that stands barely 30 centimetres above the interior ground level but rises to between 1.3 and 1.6 metres on its outer face. There is no visible fosse, which is the defensive ditch that typically accompanies enclosures of this kind, and no clear entrance can be identified. What makes the site quietly puzzling is how much its apparent shape has shifted between historical maps: the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch edition recorded it as a near-circular feature roughly 45 metres across, with a bank surviving only on the western side, while by the 1924 edition it appeared as a D-shape cut short on the east by a later north-south field boundary.

The change in outline between those two maps probably reflects less any dramatic transformation of the monument itself and more the encroachment of agricultural land management over the intervening decades. Terry Barry, writing in 1977, classified the site as a moated site, a category of enclosure typically associated with Anglo-Norman settlement from the medieval period, where a raised or embanked platform provided a defensible residence, often surrounded by a water-filled ditch. The absence of a visible fosse here makes that identification provisional rather than certain. What adds further texture to the location is its neighbours: a rath and a ringfort, both earthwork enclosures of likely early medieval Irish origin, sit roughly 110 metres to the northwest and northeast respectively. Finding three such features in such close proximity, each of potentially different date and function, concentrated along the head of a small south-to-north valley, suggests this corner of Wexford was a focus of sustained human activity across several centuries.

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