Ringfort (Rath), Ballycogly, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballycogly, Co. Wexford

Near Ballycogly in County Wexford, a circular enclosure sits in the landscape almost entirely out of sight, visible not to the naked eye but only from the air, where crops betray what the ground keeps quiet.

What looks like an ordinary field at ground level reveals, in aerial photographs, the ghostly outline of a ringfort roughly 40 metres across, its presence registered through a cropmark, the phenomenon by which buried ditches and banks cause crops above them to grow at slightly different rates, producing pale or dark rings that become legible only from altitude.

The site takes the form of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Here, the defining feature is a single fosse, which is to say a ditch, with faint traces of a further enclosing feature visible to the south-west. The surrounding landscape is notably level, which may partly explain why so little of the original earthwork survives above ground; low-lying, even terrain offers less natural protection against centuries of ploughing and agricultural activity. The site was identified and recorded through aerial photographic analysis, the photographs showing the cropmark clearly enough to establish the enclosure's approximate diameter and its general form.

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