Ringfort, Wilkinstown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Wilkinstown, Co. Wexford

There is a ringfort in Wilkinstown, County Wexford, that you cannot see.

Stand in the pasture above it and there is nothing to give it away, no raised bank, no visible dip, no obvious trace of the roughly circular enclosure that once defined it. It exists now almost entirely as a cartographic ghost.

Ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth centuries, were built in their thousands across the country, and many survive as prominent earthworks in the landscape. This one, however, is known from a single source: the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a circular enclosure measuring approximately forty metres across in both directions, sitting towards the bottom of a south-east-facing slope. Whether it was already reduced at the time of that survey, or whether subsequent agricultural activity gradually erased whatever remained above ground, is not recorded. By the time anyone thought to look more closely, the land had closed over it.

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Pete F
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