Embbanked enclosure, Connagh, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Embbanked enclosure, Connagh, Co. Wexford

There is nothing left to see at Connagh, and yet the site refuses to disappear entirely.

What was once an embanked enclosure of roughly 45 metres in diameter, sitting on a gentle east-facing slope in County Wexford, was removed around 1980. The earthwork is gone, the ground has been returned to pasture, and a visitor standing there today would have no sense that anything unusual lay underfoot. And yet, from the air, the enclosure reappears, ghostlike, as a D-shaped cropmark defined by a single fosse, the term for a ditch that typically formed the boundary of early enclosed settlements. The cropmark, measuring approximately 40 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, emerges because the buried ditch retains moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above it to grow at a slightly different rate, a difference invisible at ground level but readable from altitude.

The enclosure appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, where it is clearly recorded as an embanked feature. By the 1925 edition, cartographers were representing it with hachures, the short strokes used to indicate relief or earthwork edges, suggesting the bank was still physically present within living memory of its eventual removal. The gap between its cartographic life and its physical end spans well over a century, during which the feature went from mapped monument to locally known landmark to levelled field. What the enclosure originally contained or when it was first constructed is not recorded, though embanked enclosures of this form in Ireland are frequently associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes serving as the boundary of a farmstead or a more socially significant enclosed site.

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