Michael Moore, Coddstown Little, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Michael Moore, Coddstown Little, Co. Wexford

Beneath the ordinary farmland of Coddstown Little, in County Wexford, an entire ancient landscape lies folded into the soil, invisible at ground level but legible from the air.

Aerial photographs reveal the ghostly outlines of a fragmented field system stretching across roughly forty acres, its boundaries showing up as cropmarks, the subtle variations in plant growth that occur above buried ditches and earthworks. The fields themselves are rectangular, some measuring around thirty metres by at least fifty, each defined by a single ditch feature. It is the kind of site that only becomes comprehensible once you step far enough back to see it whole.

Within this field system, the cropmarks point to something more complex than simple agricultural organisation. Alongside the field boundaries, aerial photographs, including digital imagery taken in July 2006, reveal a rath, an enclosure, and two ring-ditches. A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where a farmstead or homestead would have stood within a raised bank and ditch. Ring-ditches are generally interpreted as the eroded remains of prehistoric burial mounds, the circular ditch that once surrounded a now-levelled earthen mound. The presence of both settlement and funerary features within a single field system suggests the landscape at Coddstown Little was in use across a considerable span of time, with different communities leaving their marks in overlapping layers.

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