Embanked enclsoure, Kilbraney, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
At Kilbraney in County Wexford, a scrub-covered circular mound sits quietly within a landscape that has been steadily absorbing it for centuries.
Roads and farm lanes now press against its edges on almost every side, and the earthen bank that once defined its outer circuit has been cut into, built over, and gradually worn down. Yet the basic shape persists: a raised platform roughly 43 metres across, encircled by the remains of a bank and, to the north at least, traces of an external fosse, the term for the ditches that typically accompanied such enclosures as a means of marking territory or providing defence.
The site is classified as a bivallate embanked enclosure, meaning it originally had two concentric banks or boundaries, with an external diameter of approximately 65 to 70 metres. It was already being mapped in this form by the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets were produced in 1839, where it appears circumscribed by the farm lanes that still frame it today. The interior bank survives to a height of around half a metre on the north side, while the exterior face reaches about 1.4 metres, dimensions that suggest considerable original ambition even if the structure is now much eroded. One detail that puzzles is the absence of any visible entrance through the bank, which would ordinarily be expected in an enclosure of this type. The outer fosse on the north-west to north-east arc was still partially legible in the early 2000s but had been removed entirely by 2012, lost to ground disturbance captured in aerial imagery. A retaining wall has further altered the western and southern sections, varying the width of the surviving bank considerably, from around 2.5 metres at the east to over 6 metres at the west.
