Ringfort (Rath), Grange, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
Some places announce themselves with earthworks, ridgelines, or the particular heaviness of old stone.
This one does none of that. A ringfort near Grange in County Wexford exists, for all practical purposes, only from the air. On the ground, in the pasture where a patch of woodland once stood, there is nothing to see. The ringfort has been identified solely through cropmarks on an aerial photograph, where a circular or oval enclosure roughly 35 metres across is traced by a single fosse, the term for a ditch that once defined and defended the perimeter of these early medieval farmsteads.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined by earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically associated with a single farming family and its enclosure of livestock and living space. This particular example sits on a slight south-east-facing slope, around 100 metres west-south-west of Bannow House. What gives it an additional layer of interest is the question of the woodland above it. The aerial photograph captures the cropmark extending southward from the margin of a wood that appears on the 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map but is entirely absent from the 1839 edition. That means the trees grew up, obscured part of the site, and were subsequently cleared, all within living cartographic memory, leaving the ground smoothed over and the underlying archaeology legible only to a camera looking straight down.