From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishearthworkearth‧work /ˈɜːθwɜːk $ ˈɜːrθwɜːrk/ noun [countable] PMDa large long pile of earth, used in the past to stop attacks
Examples from the Corpus
earthwork• Meantime the Trojan camp, fortified only by earthworks and deprived of its leader and its best warriors, was hard-pressed.• Shadow sites are made visible by earthworks or stone walls casting shadows in very low-level sunlight.• However, considerable earthworks do sometimes exist and these are, of course, well worth recording.• The first line of earthworks was reached.• It is true we no longer live in the cultures that produced the great temples or stone circles or earthworks.• A substantial, well-preserved Iron Age settlement with two encircling ramparts and supplementary earthworks.• Nothing like their earthworks had been seen since the earlier Iron Age of pre-Roman times.• The defences are a series of trenches with high stone and turf earthworks in between. 