Ringfort (Rath), Cullenstown, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cullenstown, Co. Wexford

At Cullenstown in County Wexford, a roughly oval patch of grass marks what was once a defended farmstead, its edges still faintly legible in the landscape more than a thousand years after it was built.

The enclosure is not dramatically prominent; the earthen bank that defines it has been worn down to somewhere between thirty centimetres and half a metre above the interior ground level, and only marginally more on the outside. Yet the overall form survives clearly enough to read, a subcircular space measuring about twenty-nine metres east to west and twenty-three metres north to south, with a causewayed entrance nearly five and a half metres wide on the eastern side.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a category of monument typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and understood to have served as the enclosed farmstead of a single family or household of middling social rank. The site sits on fairly level ground, with a small east-west stream running immediately to the north, wide enough and deep enough, at roughly two and a half metres across and over a metre deep, that it would have contributed naturally to the defensible character of the northern edge. An external fosse, a man-made ditch running from the north-east around the south and back to the north-west, reinforces this on the remaining sides. The fosse has a base width of between roughly three and nearly four metres and drops about half a metre in depth. At the southern end it has at some point been re-cut and pressed into service as a field drain, a quiet reminder that agricultural practicality has shaped and reshaped this feature long after its original purpose was forgotten.

The monument is low and unassuming on the ground, and the surrounding landscape is level enough that it offers little in the way of commanding views or obvious drama. What repays attention is the structural logic of the place: the stream doing the work of a ditch to the north, the causeway across the fosse marking the original threshold, and the whole arrangement suggesting a community in which the boundary between a home and a defended enclosure was not a sharp one.

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Pete F
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