Ringfort (Rath), Haresmead, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Haresmead, Co. Wexford

Most ringforts survive as grassy earthen banks, still legible in the landscape after fifteen centuries or more.

The one at Haresmead in County Wexford has taken a quieter path to visibility: it exists, for now, primarily as a cropmark, a ghost impression readable only from the air. When crops grow unevenly over buried features, the differential moisture in the soil reveals outlines invisible to anyone walking the field, and it is through this mechanism that aerial photographs have disclosed what survives here.

What the photographs show is a bivallate ringfort, meaning a circular enclosure defined by two concentric rings of bank and ditch rather than the single ring more commonly encountered. The interior diameter runs to roughly 25 metres, with the outer circuit extending to about 40 metres across. It sits in a fold on a south-west-facing slope, with the Corock River approximately 320 metres to the south-west, a detail that fits a familiar pattern: early medieval farmsteads, which is what ringforts typically were, tended to be sited with access to water but set back from it, on ground that offered a measure of natural shelter. An entrance gap is visible at the south of the inner enclosure, and the outer enclosure has been partly clipped at the south-east by a field bank running north-east to south-west, a small indignity of later agricultural reorganisation pressing against the older geometry beneath it.

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