Embanked enclosure, Raheenagurren, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
In a low-lying corner of County Wexford, a scrub-covered oval mound sits in the landscape without a visible entrance, its earthen bank still rising to over three metres on the outside.
That absence of any obvious way in is quietly disorienting. A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular or oval earthwork enclosure typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, usually preserves some trace of a gap or causeway. Here, none can be found, which raises the possibility that the original entrance has been absorbed into the surrounding earthworks, or simply that time and vegetation have obscured it entirely.
The enclosure has a recorded history that stretches back at least to the first Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland. On the 1839 edition of the six-inch OS map, it appears as a D-shaped form, its flat side backing onto an east-west field bank, with external dimensions of roughly 55 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south. By the 1925 edition, the cartographers rendered it differently, as a hachured area of approximately 40 metres in diameter, suggesting either physical change or simply a different surveying convention. The enclosure as it stands today is somewhat smaller in measurable terms, an oval of about 31 metres by 24 metres, defined by an earthen bank between seven and nine metres wide, with an external fosse, a drainage or defensive ditch, still faintly legible around its outer edge. Just outside the perimeter to the south-east lies a marl pit, a shallow excavation dug to extract calcareous clay once used to improve acidic soils, a feature common to agricultural landscapes across Ireland from the medieval period onwards. More striking is what surrounds the site at a slightly greater distance: evidence of intense prehistoric activity has been recorded across at least nine separate find spots or features within roughly 150 metres of the south to south-west of the enclosure, suggesting that this low-lying ground drew people long before the rath itself was raised.