Ring-ditch, Ardenagh Little, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In a field in Ardenagh Little, County Wexford, there is nothing obviously to see.
The ground is level, the landscape unremarkable. Yet from the air, something quite different emerges: a near-perfect circle, roughly twenty metres across, traced faintly into the earth and legible only through the differential growth of crops above it.
What the aerial photographs reveal is a ring-ditch, a type of monument that typically consists of a circular or near-circular ditch, sometimes enclosing a burial or ritual deposit, and dating in most cases to the Bronze Age or earlier. These features are invisible at ground level precisely because centuries of ploughing have levelled whatever bank or mound once accompanied them. What remains is the ditch cut into the subsoil, and when crops grow over it, the deeper, moister soil within the old cut feeds the plants above it differently, producing a subtle variation in colour or height that shows up clearly when viewed from altitude. The Ardenagh Little example, with its approximately twenty-metre diameter, is modest in scale but characteristic in form, a ghostly outline of a structure that once meant something to the people who dug it.