Ringfort, Ballynabarney, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
Some archaeological sites disappear not through dramatic destruction but through the quiet, incremental work of agriculture.
On the north-west-facing slope of Annagh Hill in County Wexford, a ringfort, the characteristically Irish early medieval enclosure type defined by a roughly circular earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, has all but vanished into the surrounding farmland. By 1987, reclamation of the land for pasture had erased whatever ground-level trace remained visible. The site is now known primarily through a single set of vertical aerial photographs taken in 1973, in which the outline of a scrub-covered oval enclosure can still be made out, measuring approximately 40 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west.
The photographs, taken as part of a Geological Survey Ireland aerial programme, show the western edge of the enclosure most clearly, where the remnant of an earthen bank survived long enough to cast a discernible shadow or tonal difference from the air. That such a feature could be legible from above in 1973 and entirely gone to ground-level inspection by 1987 illustrates how rapidly field improvements can consume a site that had likely stood in some form for over a thousand years. The ringfort does not sit in isolation on the hillside; a related enclosure, recorded separately, lies roughly 200 metres to the north at a slightly lower elevation, suggesting that this part of Annagh Hill was once a settled, organised landscape rather than a single outlying farmstead.