Ringfort (Rath), Arklow, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Arklow, Co. Wexford

Most ringforts are at least visible as earthworks, low grassy banks and ditches that still interrupt the landscape after a thousand or more years.

This one, near Arklow on the Wexford border, has almost entirely disappeared, and what remains can only be seen from the air. A faint cropmark, the kind of ghost that dry summers occasionally burn into agricultural land, traces a circular enclosure roughly 55 metres across. Cropmarks appear when buried features, old ditches or banks that have been ploughed flat over centuries, affect the moisture available to growing crops above them, leaving pale or dark rings readable from altitude but invisible at ground level.

The enclosure sits at the crest of a steep north-east-facing slope that drops toward the Owenduff river, a meandering channel running roughly north-west to south-east, with the stream itself about 100 metres to the east. That position is characteristic of the rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the standard form of enclosed rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. A single fosse, meaning a defensive ditch, can be traced from west around to the north and south-east, and the aerial photographs also show the parch mark of a field bank that once curved across the south-east to west of the site before being removed, probably during modern agricultural improvement. What survives of the original enclosure is essentially the buried negative space of that ditch, legible only when the conditions happen to be right.

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