Enclosure, Mylerspark, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Enclosures
In the pasture at Mylerspark, a small circular enclosure roughly fifteen metres across lies completely invisible to anyone standing in the field.
No earthwork rises above the grass, no obvious depression marks the ground. The only reason we know it exists at all is a faint marking on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great nineteenth-century cartographic project that systematically recorded Ireland's landscape at a scale fine enough to catch features that might otherwise vanish entirely from memory.
Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, though their purposes varied considerably. Some were ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval families; others may have served as animal pens, burial sites, or ritual spaces. At Mylerspark, the site sits on a shelf near the top of a north-west-facing slope, a position that would have offered a degree of natural elevation and, perhaps, a commanding view of the surrounding ground. At just fifteen metres in diameter it is a modest feature, smaller than many comparable sites. Whatever defined its boundary, whether a bank, a ditch, or some combination of both, has been reduced over the centuries to the point where grazing livestock and the ordinary work of farming have effectively erased it at surface level.