Embanked enclosure, Shelmaliere Commons, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Shelmaliere Commons, Co. Wexford

On the northern spine of the Forth Mountain ridge in County Wexford, there is a roughly circular patch of ground that has been quietly confounding categorisation for nearly two centuries.

It appears on the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an embanked enclosure, measuring somewhere between 40 and 45 metres in external diameter, and by the time the 1941 edition was produced it had become a wooded enclosure, suggesting the land use around it had shifted considerably in the intervening hundred years. Today the trees are gone, and what remains is a grass-covered area approximately 36 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, defined by an earthen bank faced with stone cladding. The bank itself is modest, around two metres wide, rising to no more than 1.5 metres on its outer northern face and barely 0.3 to one metre on the interior. There is no visible fosse, which is the defensive ditch that typically accompanies earthworks of this kind, and no identifiable entrance gap.

What makes this enclosure genuinely difficult to read is the absence of the features that would usually help date or classify it. Ringforts, the most common type of circular earthen enclosure in Ireland, generally date from the early medieval period and tend to have a clear entrance and an accompanying fosse. This site has neither. Its position near the top of a north-facing slope on the Forth Mountain ridge is a reasonable choice for an enclosure of almost any period, offering visibility and a degree of natural defensibility, but the site itself offers no firm clues about its origins or function. A National Monuments Service inspection in June 2016 found that the structure had suffered serious damage, though it was considered likely that subsurface archaeology survives. Archaeological testing carried out roughly 40 metres to the west, documented under excavation number 19E0688 by Taylor in 2019, produced no material related to the enclosure.

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