Ringfort (Rath), Deerpark, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Deerpark, Co. Wicklow

Tucked into the Wicklow forestry on a south-facing slope, this earthwork carries a puzzle at its centre that no one has yet solved.

Most ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands and date broadly to the early medieval period, follow a reasonably predictable layout: a bank, a ditch, an entrance, and an interior where domestic life once went on. This one follows that pattern up to a point, and then does something odd. Inside the main enclosure, in the eastern quadrant, there is a second, smaller bank curving inward and anchored to the main fort bank at both the south-east and north-east. It has its own centrally placed gap, two metres wide. Its purpose is not known, and neither is its date.

The rath itself is a substantial and well-preserved example of the type. The circular interior measures twenty-eight metres across, with the overall earthwork extending to about forty-one metres at its widest. The main bank varies considerably in height, from a barely perceptible rise of twenty centimetres to a much more commanding one-point-eight metres. Surrounding it is a flat-bottomed fosse, a defensive ditch roughly three-and-a-half metres wide and over a metre deep, with a counterscarp bank beyond that running from the south-east around to the north-east. The original entrance on the western side is still legible as a causeway crossing the fosse, flanked by deliberate gaps in both the inner and outer banks. Three other breaks in the inner bank read differently, judged to be modern disturbance rather than original features. It is the inner earthwork, that secondary bank with its own gap sitting inside all of this, that resists tidy explanation. A stock enclosure, a subdivision of the interior space, something later added or something integral to the original design, the evidence does not say.

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Pete F
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