Embanked enclosure, Rathsillagh, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
On a southwest-facing slope in Rathsillagh, Co. Wexford, a D-shaped patch of conifer plantation quietly conceals an ancient boundary.
To the casual eye it is simply a dense block of trees, but beneath and around the planting runs a low earthen bank, just half a metre high and roughly three metres wide, tracing the edge of what was once a subcircular enclosure. There is no visible fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, which makes the site feel incomplete or partially erased, as though the landscape has been slowly digesting it for centuries.
The enclosure was recorded on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, already bisected at that point by an east-west field bank that cut across its interior. In its original form it measured approximately 60 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, placing it in the middle range of embanked enclosures, a category of monument that in Ireland broadly spans the early medieval period, though precise dating at any individual site generally requires excavation. The Tomgarrow River runs roughly 400 metres to the west, following a north-south course through the valley below. By the time the nineteenth-century surveyors recorded the site, agricultural reorganisation had already altered it; a straight field bank now marks the northern edge. What remains is a reduced D-shape, around 50 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, the conifer trees above it offering an accidental kind of preservation, keeping the fragile bank from plough damage even as they obscure it from view.
