Ringfort (Rath), Tomacork, Co. Wicklow

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tomacork, Co. Wicklow

In a field at Tomacork in County Wicklow, a nearly perfect circle sits quietly in the landscape, its curved banks still readable after more than a thousand years.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common type of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically used as a farmstead enclosed for the protection of people and livestock. What makes this one worth pausing over is the precision of its survival: three concentric layers of earthwork, each still measurable, still holding their form on a south-facing slope so gentle it barely registers as a slope at all.

The enclosure measures 33 metres in diameter, defined first by an earth and stone bank roughly 3.5 metres wide, then by an external fosse, which is a ditch, about 2.8 metres wide and a metre deep, and finally by a further outer bank 2.5 metres wide. The inner bank rises to about a metre on the interior side and reaches nearly 1.8 metres at its maximum exterior height. A ringfort with two banks and an intervening fosse is sometimes classified as a bivallate example, a distinction that occasionally signals higher social status or simply a more defensively minded builder. Whether that applies here is unknown, but the earthworks themselves are unusually intact for a site of this age sitting in ordinary agricultural ground.

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