Ringfort, Ballylarkin, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
What remains of this ringfort in Ballylarkin is, in a quiet way, a study in what gets lost when the modern world cuts straight through the ancient one.
A nineteenth-century railway line running north to south between Dublin and Wexford sliced directly through the site, leaving only the western third intact. What survives is a D-shaped grass-covered platform, roughly 35 metres north to south and 10 metres east to west, raised about half a metre above the surrounding ground. That modest elevation is often all a ringfort announces of itself; these were early medieval enclosed settlements, typically circular, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes a surrounding ditch known as a fosse. Here, there is no trace of a fosse, and no identifiable entrance survives either.
The site was recorded as a complete enclosure on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, with a diameter of approximately 50 metres, suggesting a fairly typical example of the form before the railway arrived and reduced it to a fragment. By the time that map was made, the ringfort itself was already long out of use; such sites belong broadly to the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and by the nineteenth century they were landscape features rather than living places. The Ordnance Survey cartographers noted and mapped many such earthworks across the country, providing a valuable record of what existed before subsequent development altered or erased them. In this case, the record preserves the memory of a circle that is now, on the ground, only an arc.