Enclosure, Ballyward, Co. Wicklow

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyward, Co. Wicklow

In a field in Ballyward, County Wicklow, there sits a roughly oval earthwork that official records have struggled to agree on.

It is the kind of site that raises quiet questions: is it a ringfort, or something else entirely, and does the distinction even matter when the thing itself has been sitting in the landscape for perhaps a thousand years or more?

The site was first catalogued as a ringfort in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1986. A ringfort, to use the older term, is a circular or oval enclosed settlement, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and associated mainly with early medieval Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. By 1995, when the Record of Monuments and Places was compiled, the classification had shifted to the more cautious designation of possible enclosure, a broader and deliberately non-committal term that archaeologists use when the function or date of a feature cannot be confidently established. What prompted the reclassification was not excavation or fieldwork but cartographic evidence, meaning the site was identified and assessed from historical maps rather than boots on the ground. The dimensions recorded at that point were approximately 38 metres north to south and 43 metres east to west, making it a moderately sized feature by the standards of such earthworks.

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Pete F
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