Ringfort (Rath), Oulartwick More, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Oulartwick More, Co. Wexford

A ringfort that has never been excavated, never been mapped on official surveys, and exists in the archaeological record almost entirely because someone looked closely at a satellite image is not a common thing.

This rath at Oulartwick More in County Wexford was first reported by Simon Dowling after he noticed it on Google Earth, where a cropmark, the faint differential in crop growth that betrays buried features beneath a field, traces the outline of a D-shaped enclosure on a fairly steep west-facing slope. Without that aerial view, there would be little reason to suspect anything was there at all.

The enclosure measures roughly 37 metres on its north-northwest to south-southeast axis and about 30 metres across, and it is defined by a single fosse, the ditch that would originally have encircled the settlement, separating the enclosed farmstead from the surrounding landscape. A field bank running in the same north-northwest to south-southeast direction cuts across its western side, truncating the original form. More intriguing is a U-shaped feature about 16 metres long in the southern part of the enclosure, which may be the remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval ringforts and used variously for storage, shelter, or refuge. If that identification is correct, it would suggest the site dates to somewhere in the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when ringforts were the standard form of rural settlement across Ireland. For now, though, the cropmark alone is what survives in any legible form, visible on a single Google Earth image dated to July 2018 and essentially invisible to anyone walking the field.

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