Ring-ditch, Lacken, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Lacken, Co. Wexford

In a field in Lacken, County Wexford, a circle roughly seven metres across exists in the landscape without announcing itself to anyone walking past.

It is not visible as a raised feature or a hollow underfoot; the only way it has been recorded at all is through aerial photography, where crop or soil marks betray the faint outline of a ring-ditch, a type of roughly circular trench that in Irish prehistory was often associated with burial practice, sometimes enclosing a mound that has long since been levelled by centuries of ploughing.

The site sits on a gentle west-facing slope within the basin of the River Sow, with a small north-south stream running approximately 220 metres to the west. That positioning, on low-lying but slightly elevated ground near water, is typical of how early agricultural and ritual sites were placed in the Irish landscape. Ring-ditches of this kind are frequently the last surviving trace of Bronze Age funerary monuments, the circular trench having once surrounded a central burial or cairn. What stood or lay at the centre of this particular example is unknown; the aerial evidence alone offers the outline, nothing more.

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Pete F
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