Ringfort (Rath), Ramsgrange, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
Near Ramsgrange in County Wexford, on a gentle east-facing slope, the ground holds the ghost of a structure that has not been visible at surface level for a very long time.
What survives is not a dramatic earthwork but a cropmark, the kind of trace that only reveals itself from the air, when differential growth in vegetation above buried features produces faint but readable patterns in the landscape.
Aerial photography has picked out the remains of what appears to be an incomplete circular enclosure defined by two widely spaced fosses, the term for the ditches that typically surrounded a rath or ringfort. Ringforts were the predominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. At Ramsgrange, the enclosure is not fully intact even as a cropmark, suggesting either that part of the original structure was never completed, or that later activity has obscured portions of it. The two images that capture it show only a faint feature, the kind of thing easy to overlook even when you know where to look.
