Ringfort (Rath), Ballyconor Little, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyconor Little, Co. Wexford

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with earthworks you can walk around and touch.

This one in Ballyconor Little, County Wexford, has a quieter kind of presence: it exists most clearly from the air, where it shows up as a cropmark, the faint discolouration in growing vegetation caused by buried features affecting how plants draw moisture and nutrients from the soil. What those cropmarks reveal is a large D-shaped or subcircular enclosure, roughly 60 metres across on its northeast-to-southwest axis and approximately 55 metres on the northwest-to-southeast, defined by a single wide fosse, essentially a defensive ditch, somewhere between three and five metres across. On the ground, there may be almost nothing to see.

This is a rath, one of the thousands of ringforts scattered across the Irish countryside, most of them dating to the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the fosse and any accompanying bank marking out a family's territory and providing a degree of security for people and livestock. The example at Ballyconor Little sits on fairly level ground, which is typical enough, though the presence of a modern laneway running northwest to southeast along its southwestern edge complicates the picture a little. That laneway may have clipped the enclosure slightly, truncating its southwestern arc, so the full original extent is difficult to judge with certainty. The cropmark has been identified on multiple aerial photograph series, including Ordnance Survey Ireland imagery from 2000 and Google Earth coverage from 2003, which between them confirm the enclosure's shape and general dimensions across different points in time.

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