Ring-ditch, Ballymacoonoge, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Ballymacoonoge, Co. Wexford

In a field in County Wexford, the ground holds the faint outline of something that was never properly excavated and may never be.

A magnetometer survey, the kind that reads buried features through their magnetic contrast with surrounding soil rather than through any digging, picked up three weak signals here that together suggest a roughly circular enclosure roughly fourteen to sixteen metres across, with what may be an entrance gap at its northern side. Two possible pits sit somewhere within that circuit, and linear features trail away from its edges, one heading northwest and another southeast. None of this is visible at the surface.

The survey was carried out in 2018, ahead of a proposed quarry development, and the feature sits approximately seven metres southwest of a neighbouring ring-ditch, a type of monument typically understood as the buried trace of a prehistoric funerary or ceremonial enclosure, the circular ditch that once surrounded a mound or marked a ritually significant space. The proximity of the two features to one another is suggestive, though what exactly that relationship might have been remains open. Subsequent archaeological testing of the surrounding area turned up no related material, and monitoring of topsoil removal across a roughly L-shaped area of about 3.3 hectares to the east and south similarly produced nothing. The enclosure itself has been set aside within a fallow area rather than disturbed, leaving it more or less where it was found, unresolved and unexcavated, preserved largely because there was nothing definitive enough to justify either investigation or destruction.

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Pete F
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