Ringfort (Rath), Lewistown, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lewistown, Co. Wexford

Most of what we know about this early medieval enclosure at Lewistown comes not from excavation or fieldwork, but from the air.

A circular cropmark, the kind that appears when buried ditches retain more moisture than the surrounding soil and cause the crops above them to grow fractionally taller or greener, reveals the ghostly outline of a rath, the Irish word for a ringfort, on the northern edge of a low plateau in County Wexford. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one, however, survives mostly as an impression in the earth, legible primarily to a camera pointed downward from a light aircraft.

The enclosure is defined by two concentric fosse features, that is, ditches cut into the ground rather than banks raised above it. The inner ditch is the wider of the two, measuring around five metres across, while the outer is narrower at approximately two metres. Together they frame a roughly circular interior about thirty metres in diameter, with the whole arrangement extending to around sixty metres from outer edge to outer edge. There is a gap of approximately ten metres in the inner fosse on the north-west side, most likely the original entrance. A north-south field bank clips the eastern edge, truncating the enclosure slightly, which suggests that later agricultural boundaries were laid out without much concern for what lay beneath the soil. A second, neighbouring enclosure is attached to the outer fosse on its west-south-west to north-west arc, hinting that whatever activity took place here was not confined to a single ring.

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