Enclosure, Ballybeg, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
There is an enclosure at Ballybeg in County Wexford that no one walking the land would know was there.
It exists, for practical purposes, only from the air, and even then only under the right conditions. A satellite image captured in July 2018 on Google Earth revealed the faint outline of a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 35 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, its presence betrayed not by any visible earthwork but by a cropmark, the kind of subtle variation in vegetation colour and growth that appears in dry summers when buried ditches retain slightly more moisture than the surrounding soil, causing the crops or grass above them to grow or ripen differently.
The enclosure sits on a south-west-facing slope at the head of a valley running northeast to southwest. What defines it is a fosse, a shallow ditch dug to demarcate the boundary of the enclosed area, though so little of it survives in any legible form that it can barely be traced along the western, northern, and eastern arcs. Enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and are associated with a wide range of periods and purposes, from early medieval settlement and farming to prehistoric ritual use, though nothing in what is currently known about this particular site allows a confident date to be assigned. It was first reported by Simon Dowling, and its existence as a recorded site depends almost entirely on that single aerial observation.
