Ringfort (Rath), Ballyshane, Co. Wicklow

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyshane, Co. Wicklow

Most ringforts announce themselves clearly, their raised banks and ditches still legible after a thousand years of farming pressure.

The one at Ballyshane, Co. Wicklow, is more ambiguous. Only the western arc of its enclosure survives as a proper earthen bank, standing between 1.4 and 1.8 metres high and about five metres wide, where it has been absorbed into a field boundary and so, by accident, preserved. The rest of the circuit survives as little more than a low scarp, in places just twenty centimetres above the surrounding ground, trailing around an east-facing slope as though trying not to draw attention to itself.

A rath, the Irish term for this class of monument, is a ringfort defined by earthen rather than stone construction. These enclosures were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. The bank at Ballyshane, circular with a diameter of twenty-eight metres, would once have been accompanied by an external ditch, or fosse, but no trace of one remains here. There is no visible entrance either, which may simply reflect how much of the original form has been lost to agricultural use over the centuries. A drystone revetment visible on the outer face of the surviving bank appears to be a later addition, probably a practical repair by farmers working the land, rather than anything original. A field drain skirting the bank is similarly modern. The one other internal feature is a slight scarp, just thirty centimetres high, running east to west through the centre of the enclosure, though what it represents is unclear.

What survives at Ballyshane is, by any measure, a partial record. The site is of the kind that rewards patient looking rather than immediate spectacle, its significance more in what it implies about the early medieval landscape of Wicklow than in anything now visible above ground.

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