Ringfort, Rochestown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
There is a ringfort in Rochestown, County Wexford, that most people walk or drive past without any awareness that it exists.
It leaves no impression on the landscape, no raised bank, no hollow, no visible boundary. Beneath a cereal crop, the ground gives nothing away.
What we know of it comes largely from a single cartographic moment. On the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a faint small enclosure, roughly 25 metres in diameter, sitting towards the lower end of an east-facing slope with a north-south stream running about 100 metres to the east. A ringfort, in the broadest sense, is a circular enclosed settlement, typically of early medieval date in Ireland, defined by one or more earthen banks or ditches and used as a farmstead or dwelling. This one, if the earthworks ever were substantial, has been reduced to near-invisibility. The 1839 cartographers caught it at a moment when it was apparently still legible enough to record, however faintly, but the land has since swallowed whatever remained.
