Enclosure, Ballynabarny, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynabarny, Co. Wexford

On a gentle north-west-facing slope in County Wexford, a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across has spent centuries being slowly absorbed into the working landscape, its outline surviving not as a visible monument but as a curve in a field bank, a whisper of an older boundary pressed into the modern one.

What gives it away, if anything does, is a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing crops that betrays buried ditches or earthworks beneath the soil, visible on a Google Earth image captured in July 2018 but otherwise imperceptible at ground level.

A fosse, essentially a shallow ditch used to define and defend the perimeter of an enclosure, traces the south-west, west, and north-east arc of the circle, though its surviving form is faint enough to escape casual notice. The field bank that now occupies much of the perimeter's north-east to south-west run was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1835 and 1902, suggesting that the boundary had long since been repurposed by farmers working the land without necessarily knowing what they were following. A second, smaller fosse or drain departs from the perimeter at the north-west, curves away from it by a maximum of about eight metres, then rejoins it at the north-east, an unusual feature whose original function is not recorded. The site was first reported by Simon Dowling, and its formal documentation drew on that enhanced aerial view to establish the enclosure's dimensions and shape.

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