Enclosure, Ballyduff, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyduff, Co. Wexford

On a southeast-facing slope in County Wexford, a circular enclosure roughly 54 metres across sits invisible to anyone walking the land.

No earthwork rises above the turf, no stonework breaks the surface. The only way to see it at all is from above, and even then only under the right conditions: it appears as a cropmark, the faint ghost of a buried fosse or drain that shows up in satellite imagery when differential moisture in the soil causes crops or grass to grow at slightly different rates over the line of the old cut.

The enclosure at Ballyduff was first identified by Simon Dowling, who spotted it on Google Earth imagery captured on 14 July 2018. The shape is roughly circular, measuring approximately 54 metres north to south and 51 metres east to west, which puts it at a scale consistent with a ringfort or enclosed settlement of early medieval date, though no such attribution has been formally confirmed for this site. The perimeter is not fully legible even from the air; only the southern, northern, and eastern arc can be traced with any confidence, the western side fading out of view. The enclosure sits at the base of a steeper slope that rises away to the northwest, a positioning that would have offered some natural shelter and a useful outlook across the lower ground to the southeast.

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Pete F
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