Ringfort (Rath), Moyne, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
By 1987, this ringfort had effectively disappeared into a cereal field.
What had once been a legible, if modest, Early Medieval enclosure in low-lying County Wexford was by then invisible from the air and presumably from the ground, swallowed by decades of agricultural use. That kind of quiet erasure is common enough, but the site's story, pieced together from earlier observations, gives a reasonable sense of what once existed here.
A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the Early Medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a place of habitation and livestock management. This one at Moyne was never especially grand. When it appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839, it showed up only as a curving field bank running roughly south-east to north-west, already partly absorbed into the working landscape around it. By the 1940s, whoever examined it found a circular area of about twenty-five metres in diameter, bounded by a low bank no more than 0.4 metres high. The southern portion of that bank had been incorporated into an ordinary field boundary, and there were faint traces of an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the enclosure. It was fragmentary even then. Immediately to the north sits a moated site, a separate class of monument associated with Anglo-Norman settlement, where a raised platform would have been surrounded by a water-filled ditch. The proximity of the two monuments suggests this corner of Wexford was occupied, in different ways and by different communities, across a considerable stretch of time.