Ringfort (Rath), Assagart, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Assagart, Co. Wexford

There is a ringfort at Assagart in County Wexford that you cannot see from the ground.

No earthwork rises from the fields, no grassy bank betrays the outline of an early medieval farmstead. Instead, the site exists primarily as a cropmark, a ghostly circle roughly 40 metres across that appears in aerial photographs when differential growth in the vegetation above reveals the buried remains of a fosse, the encircling ditch that once defined this enclosed settlement.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country. They were typically the enclosed homesteads of farming families during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and consisted of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. At Assagart, the fosse feature appears as a continuous ring in the aerial record, suggesting the enclosure survives in reasonably complete form beneath the soil, even if nothing is visible at the surface. A second enclosure of a similar type lies approximately 280 metres to the south, hinting that this part of County Wexford was once a settled and organised agricultural landscape. Archaeological testing carried out around 50 metres to the west of the Assagart site, recorded under excavation reference 09E0304 and reported by Ó Drisceoil in 2012, produced no material related to the ringfort, leaving its history largely unread.

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Pete F
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