Ringfort, Park, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
Sometimes the most interesting thing about an archaeological site is that there is nothing to see.
In a pasture field in Park, County Wexford, a ringfort of roughly 25 metres in diameter sits beneath the grass without leaving so much as a ridge or hollow to betray its presence. Ringforts, which are circular enclosures typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, serving as farmsteads and enclosures for livestock. This one, however, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that it exists now almost entirely as a cartographic fact rather than a physical one.
The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839, which means surveyors working in the decade before the Famine could still make out its outline clearly enough to mark it. At that point it was already ancient, but legible. In the intervening nearly two centuries, centuries of ploughing, grazing, and agricultural improvement have done what time alone might not have managed, and the earthworks have been levelled to invisibility. The site sits on a slight rise at the lower end of a south-facing slope, the kind of modest, practical elevation that early medieval farmers favoured for reasons of drainage and outlook, though today the ground offers no obvious clue that anyone ever made deliberate use of it.
