Ringfort (Rath), Hill, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Hill, Co. Wexford

On a gentle west-facing slope in County Wexford, the ground holds the ghost of a double-ditched enclosure that is almost entirely invisible to anyone walking across it.

What survives is a cropmark, the kind of trace that only reveals itself from the air, where differences in soil moisture and crop growth betray buried features beneath. Aerial photographs show two concentric fosse lines, meaning defensive or enclosing ditches, with an inner enclosure of roughly thirty metres in diameter and an outer one of around fifty metres. No earthwork mounds, no visible bank; just the faint geometry of a place that was once deliberately bounded and is now readable only in the right light, at the right season, from altitude.

The site may carry a name that reaches back to the mid-seventeenth century. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land census compiled under Cromwellian administration to document Irish landholding, records a boundary feature called the Rath of Ragow along the line dividing the parishes of Kilturk and Kilmore. That a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosed farmstead of early medieval date, should be used as a parish boundary marker is not unusual; such enclosures were already ancient landmarks by the time surveyors came to note them, and their prominent positions made them useful reference points. Whether the Rath of Ragow and this cropmark enclosure are one and the same cannot be confirmed, but the location and character are suggestive enough to make the connection worth noting.

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Pete F
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