Ringfort (Rath), Curraghmore, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
Most ringforts announce themselves with a raised earthen bank, a ditch, or at least a distinct circular mound sitting in a field.
The one at Curraghmore in County Wexford is less forthcoming. What survives here is barely a whisper in the landscape: a shallow scarp, roughly 32 metres in arc and no more than 0.4 metres high, curving through pasture on the south-east to south-west side of the site. The clearest evidence for the enclosure's existence comes not from standing on the ground but from looking down at it, in the form of a cropmark visible on aerial photography.
Cropmarks appear when buried or near-buried features affect how vegetation grows above them. The differential moisture retention of a filled ditch or a compacted bank shows up in dry summers as a patchwork of lighter and darker growth, legible from the air even when invisible at ground level. Here, the aerial evidence outlines a subcircular enclosure with an internal diameter of approximately 35 metres, sitting on a broad, low ridge running north to south. A rath, the Irish term for this type of enclosed farmstead, was typically the residence of a farming family of some local status during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation; many, like this one, have been quietly reduced over centuries of agricultural activity until almost nothing remains above the surface.