Ringfort (Rath), Gibberwell, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
There is a ringfort near Gibberwell in County Wexford that you could walk across without ever knowing it was there.
No earthwork rises from the field, no ditch catches the eye, no grassy bank interrupts the pasture. The only way to see it at all is from the air, where the buried remains of its encircling fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the settlement, leave a faint circular shadow in the growing crops above.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined by earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated buildings. This one at Gibberwell measures approximately 65 metres in diameter, placing it within the normal range for such sites, and sits on a slight spur of ground running northwest to southeast through an otherwise fairly level landscape. The enclosure is defined by a single fosse, meaning it had one circuit of ditch rather than the multiple concentric rings sometimes seen at higher-status sites. Its existence was confirmed through aerial photography, on which the cropmark of the circular feature is visible across the southeast, west, and northwest arc of the enclosure. Cropmarks form when buried features affect the moisture and nutrients available to crops above them, causing subtle but detectable variation in growth that becomes legible from altitude even when the ground itself has long since been levelled.
For anyone visiting the general area, there is little to observe on the ground itself. The site lies in pasture and offers no surface trace. Its interest is, in a sense, conceptual: the knowledge that an entire enclosed farmstead, perhaps fifteen centuries old, persists invisibly beneath an ordinary Wexford field, legible only to cameras carried high above it.