Ringfort (Rath), Mylerspark, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Mylerspark, Co. Wexford

On a south-westward-facing slope in County Wexford, a circle of grass and fern quietly marks the outline of an early medieval settlement that has been sitting in the landscape for well over a thousand years.

What makes this particular ringfort quietly puzzling is the absence of any visible entrance. Most raths, as these earthwork enclosures are commonly known, enclosed a farmstead and its outbuildings within a raised bank and ditch, with a clear gap in the perimeter serving as a gateway. Here, that gap has either been obscured by centuries of soil movement and vegetation, or it simply no longer reads as a break in the ground.

The enclosure measures 43 metres east to west, defined by an earthen bank that survives with more integrity along the eastern, southern, and western arcs, where it still rises to an external height of around 1.2 metres. Along the western to northern stretch, the bank has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low edge in the ground rather than a proper mounded feature. Adding a further complication, a later field boundary running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east cuts across the north-eastern part of the perimeter, truncating it and suggesting that at some point in the post-medieval period the monument was simply absorbed into an agricultural field system without much ceremony. An outer fosse, which is the ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to add a degree of defensive depth, survives along the south-eastern to south-western arc, with a base width of around two metres and a depth of half a metre. It is a modest but legible arrangement, the kind of enclosure that would once have sheltered a small farming household during the early centuries of the first millennium AD.

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Pete F
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