Ring-ditch, Kilconnib, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Kilconnib, Co. Wexford

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or crumbling walls.

Others exist only as whispers in a field, legible solely from the air on the right dry summer's day. The ring-ditch at Kilconnib, County Wexford, belongs firmly to the second category. It is invisible at ground level, with no surface trace to catch the eye of a passing walker, yet overhead it resolves into a neat circular form, its outline preserved in the differential growth of crops above a long-buried ditch.

A ring-ditch is essentially the filled-in remains of a circular fosse, or ditch, that once enclosed a small area of ground. These features are generally associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity, the ditch having originally surrounded a burial mound or flat grave that has since been completely levelled by centuries of ploughing. What survives at Kilconnib sits at the crest of a south-facing slope on a broad ridge running northeast to southwest, a position that would have made it conspicuous in the landscape when it was first constructed. The cropmark, first reported by Simon Dowling, shows an internal diameter of roughly ten metres, defined by a fosse approximately two to three metres wide. That ditch is at its most faint on the southern side, suggesting either differential survival or some original variation in its construction. The feature was identified from Google Earth imagery captured in July 2018, and it remains detectable only under the particular conditions of crop stress that make buried soil disturbances visible from altitude.

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