Ringfort (Rath), Ballyclemock, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
There is a ringfort at Ballyclemock in County Wexford that you cannot see by standing in the field above it.
Walking the pasture on its steep east-facing slope, with the Tomgarrow stream running north to south some sixty metres below, there is nothing to indicate that a substantial enclosed settlement once occupied this ground. The earthworks have been levelled, the banks absorbed into farmland, and the site exists now primarily as absence.
What survives is visible only from the air. An aerial photograph, reference GB89.AO.22, reveals a cropmark, the differential growth of grass or crops over buried features, outlining an incomplete curvilinear enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter. The cropmark traces a fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have surrounded the rath, and shows an entrance gap facing south-east. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosure, typically circular and defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, used in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a circular enclosure with a somewhat larger diameter of approximately forty metres, suggesting the cartographers were working from traces that have since disappeared entirely. A second rath is recorded immediately to the north, indicating this was not an isolated settlement but part of a small cluster of enclosed farmsteads in this stretch of south Wexford.

