Ringfort (Rath), Ballybrazil, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballybrazil, Co. Wexford

On the south-western slope of Slievecoiltia Hill in County Wexford, there is a circular earthwork roughly 38 metres across that has no identifiable entrance.

That absence is quietly arresting. A ringfort, or rath, was typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, its bank and ditch marking out a family's living space and livestock enclosure, so the lack of any obvious way in or out gives this one an unresolved quality that sets it apart from more legible examples.

The site sits towards the lower part of the hill's slope, overgrown with grass and scrub, steepening sharply towards the south-west. Its enclosure is defined by a low internal bank on the north-west to north-east arc, and a scarp, a natural-looking step in the ground, doing similar work elsewhere around the circuit. Beyond that inner boundary lies an external fosse, a broad ditch roughly eight metres wide and just over a metre deep on its northern side, which gradually flattens into a wide berm as it curves around the monument. Most intriguing is a further earthwork visible to the south and south-west, a scarp standing around two metres high and set some ten metres out from the outer edge of the monument. Surveyors have noted that this outermost feature may simply be a natural escarpment above a stream running westward off the hill, but it gives the site the suggestion of a second, outer ring, a feature associated with higher-status raths in the early medieval landscape.

The topography does much of the interpretive work here. The way the monument blends into the hillside, its banks low and worn, its fosse partially absorbed by a field boundary, means the eye has to work to separate the man-made from the geological. That ambiguity, especially in the outermost scarp, is part of what makes the site worth attention.

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Pete F
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