Ringfort (Rath), Ballymoney, Co. Wicklow

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballymoney, Co. Wicklow

What survives of this early medieval enclosure in Ballymoney, County Wicklow, is a study in partial persistence.

The earthwork has been absorbed into the working landscape to the east, where its bank, still carrying a facing of drystone, now doubles as a field boundary. To the west, a good portion of the site has been recently destroyed altogether. What remains occupies a gentle north to north-east-facing slope at the foot of steeper ground, an orientation that would have offered some shelter while keeping the enclosure open to whatever light the hillside allowed.

The ringfort, or rath, takes the form most commonly encountered across early medieval Ireland: a roughly circular area, here about twenty-five metres in diameter, enclosed by a single bank of earth and stone. That bank runs to about two metres wide, rising half a metre on the interior and between seventy centimetres and a little over a metre on the exterior face. A rath of this kind would typically have served as a farmstead enclosure, home to a family of middling status in the period roughly spanning the fifth to twelfth centuries, the bank providing both a physical boundary and a marker of social standing. The entrance, just a metre wide, sits at the north-east. There is no sign of an external fosse, the term for the ditch that often accompanies such banks, and no visible internal features have been recorded.

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