Ringfort (Rath), Churchlands, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
There is nothing to see at this site, not in any conventional sense.
No earthwork rises above the soil, no ditch cuts the field, and nothing marks the ground to suggest that a substantial enclosed settlement once occupied this spot in County Wexford. The only evidence that anything is here at all comes from aerial photographs taken in the 1970s, in which faint cropmarks betray the ghost of a double-ditched ringfort beneath the farmland of Churchlands.
Cropmarks appear when buried features affect how crops grow above them; the soil filling a ditch retains more moisture and produces lusher growth, while compacted foundations do the opposite, and from altitude these differences read as pale or dark lines against the surrounding field. In this case, the photographs from the GSIAP aerial collection of the 1970s reveal two concentric enclosures. The inner one measures roughly 25 metres north to south and has been cut through by a later field bank running in the same direction, so only the western half shows up in the image. The outer enclosure is considerably larger, around 80 metres north to south, and its traces curve south, west, and north around the inner ring. Taken together, the dimensions suggest a rath of some status; a rath being the Irish term for a ringfort, typically a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or high-status residence during the early medieval period. Double-ditched examples of this scale were generally associated with wealthier or more powerful occupants than the single-ring type.
The site sits on a slight rise in a gently undulating landscape, the kind of low prominence that early medieval settlers favoured for drainage and visibility. That the cropmarks appear in only one aerial collection, and not others, suggests the conditions that make them legible are narrow, perhaps depending on a particular crop, a dry summer, or the exact angle of the survey flight. On the ground today, the site gives nothing away.