Ringfort (Rath), Askinch, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Askinch, Co. Wexford

By 1987, only a fragment of this early medieval enclosure remained visible above the ground at Askinch in County Wexford, and yet what survives is quietly legible to anyone who knows what to look for.

A stretch of earthen bank, between four and six metres wide and rising to nearly two metres in height, curves around the western and northern edges of what was once a roughly circular enclosure about fifty-one metres across. Alongside it runs an external fosse, a defensive ditch dug to reinforce the barrier, still reaching a metre and a half deep at its lowest point. Together they are the remnants of a rath, the commonest type of ringfort in Ireland, a form of enclosed farmstead that would have housed a family of some local standing during the early medieval period, roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries.

What makes this particular site quietly anomalous is the circumstances of its cartographic survival. It does not appear on the standard nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey mapping that documented so many of Ireland's earthworks; it surfaces only on the 1940 edition of the OS six-inch map, and even then merely as a fragment of bank and fosse to the south-east. The site occupies a south-east-facing slope at the headwaters of a small stream running on a north-west to south-east axis, with a spur of higher ground extending away to the north-east. That careful positioning, sheltered, well-drained, and close to a reliable water source, is entirely typical of how rath builders selected their ground, making practical use of natural topography rather than choosing sites for any symbolic or defensive drama.

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