A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of roughly circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead and dwelling during the early medieval period, once occupied this quiet corner of County Wexford. Locals knew it well enough to have a name for it. Then, sometime in the 1960s, the enclosure was levelled, the earth pushed aside or spread out, and the visible structure was lost.

What remains is stranger and more stubborn than the original earthwork. The ground still rises very slightly in a circle of around 39 metres in diameter, a faint memory held in the soil that the eye can just about detect at ground level. More legibly, aerial photographs reveal the site as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features such as ditches and banks affect the growth of crops above them, producing patterns visible only from the air. In this case, a single fosse, essentially a ditch that would originally have enclosed the rath, traces the outline of what once stood here, and there are indications that an outer bank may also have accompanied it. The site at Newtown Big is, in a sense, more archaeologically present now than it appeared to those who cleared it six decades ago, because the landscape itself has preserved the shape of the thing even as the thing itself was removed.