Ringfort (Rath), Hilltown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Hilltown, Co. Wexford

Most ringforts announce themselves through earthworks you can walk up to and touch, raised banks and ditches that have survived centuries of farming and weather.

The one at Hilltown in County Wexford has taken a quieter route into the record. Nothing rises above the surrounding ground here; the site exists almost entirely as a cropmark, a faint circular shadow that only becomes legible when viewed from above, where differences in soil moisture and crop growth betray the buried outline of what was once an enclosure roughly fifty metres across.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was the standard form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular bank and an outer ditch. The Hilltown example is defined by a single fosse, the term used for that enclosing ditch, which is no longer visible at ground level but has left enough of a trace in the soil to show up on aerial photography. The circular cropmark, around fifty metres in diameter, can be identified on specialist aerial survey photographs and was still faintly readable on Google Earth imagery as recently as 2011. A second rath, a separate and distinct site, sits approximately a hundred metres to the west-southwest, suggesting this modest corner of County Wexford once supported at least two of these enclosures in relatively close proximity, which was not unusual in areas of productive agricultural land during the early medieval period.

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