Ringfort (Rath), Mountnebo, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Mountnebo, Co. Wexford

On an east-facing slope near the tip of a spur running off Slievebaun Hill in County Wexford, a roughly square earthwork sits quietly inside a coniferous forest, its origins obscured by centuries of woodland growth.

What makes it unusual is partly a matter of classification: although the site carries the word "ringfort" in its name, it has been formally identified as a moated site, a category that places it in a very different historical context. Moated sites, typically rectangular or square enclosures surrounded by a water-filled or dry ditch, are generally associated with Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, used by minor lords and landowners as defended farmsteads rather than as the earlier Gaelic-period ring-forts that dot the Irish countryside.

The enclosure measures roughly 52 metres on each side, with rounded corners softening its otherwise geometric outline. A low earthen bank, two to three metres wide and less than half a metre high, defines the perimeter, with an external fosse, essentially a ditch cut around the outside, adding a further modest defensive feature. No entrance survives visibly in the earthwork today. More intriguing are two low interior banks that run parallel to the northwest and southeast sides, each set about eight metres inward from the outer bank, whose purpose is not immediately obvious from the ground. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1940, the area is marked simply as a rectangular wood, suggesting the forest cover is not recent and that the earthwork has been quietly sheltering beneath trees for a very long time. A separate rath, one of the circular earthen enclosures more typically associated with early medieval Irish settlement, lies approximately 200 metres to the west, making this a small landscape with two distinct archaeological signatures placed in close proximity.

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