Ringfort (Rath), Ballyseskin, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyseskin, Co. Wexford

At Ballyseskin in County Wexford, there is a ringfort that no one walking the land would ever know was there.

It exists, in any practical sense, only from the air. Aerial photographs reveal a cropmark, the faint circular shadow left in growing crops when buried soil features affect how plants take up moisture and nutrients, tracing the outline of a circular enclosure roughly 45 metres across. The feature that defines it is a fosse, a shallow ditch, narrow but continuous, cutting a near-perfect circle into the subsoil. At ground level, the landscape is flat and unremarkable. Nothing breaks the surface.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined primarily by an earthen bank and ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Ballyseskin example is among those that have been effectively erased from the visible landscape, its earthworks levelled at some point, leaving only the ghost of the original fosse preserved in the soil chemistry beneath. What makes its situation particularly interesting is its proximity to two other related sites. A second rath lies approximately 60 metres to the north-northwest, and a further enclosure sits around 110 metres to the southeast. Three such features clustered within a relatively small area suggests this part of Wexford was once a reasonably busy pocket of early settlement, even if the land today gives no hint of that.

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Pete F
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