Ringfort (Rath), Knockhowlin, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knockhowlin, Co. Wexford

At Knockhowlin in County Wexford, a settlement that probably stood for centuries has become almost entirely invisible at ground level.

What survives is a cropmark, a faint circular trace roughly thirty metres across, readable only from the air, where the buried outline of a surrounding ditch causes the crops above it to grow slightly differently from those on either side.

The feature is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath typically consisted of a circular earthen bank, sometimes with an outer ditch or fosse, enclosing a domestic space where a family would have lived and kept livestock. Here, the defining element is that single fosse, a rock-cut or earthen ditch, whose shape has been preserved beneath the soil long after the raised bank above it eroded away. The site sits on fairly level ground, with a small north-south stream running approximately 130 metres to the east, a detail that would have mattered greatly to whoever chose this location, water being essential to any working farmstead. The cropmark has been identified across several sets of aerial photographs, including images captured in 2000 and again in 2006, each pass of the camera confirming the same quiet circular outline pressed into the Wexford landscape.

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