Ringfort (Rath), Rathmore, Co. Wexford

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathmore, Co. Wexford

There is a ringfort in Rathmore, County Wexford, that you can walk straight past without seeing a thing.

On flat agricultural land, beneath what has typically been a cereal crop, the site is effectively invisible at ground level. The only way to perceive it properly is from the air, where it appears as a cropmark enclosure roughly 60 metres in diameter, the buried remains of the bank subtly affecting how the crop above it grows, tracing a circle across the field that no amount of walking would reveal.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland most commonly as a farmstead and its surrounding boundary. This particular example was recorded as a large ringfort by MacLeighim in 1920, suggesting it was a substantial structure by the standards of such sites. By the time an Ordnance Survey field memoir was compiled in 1940, however, only a partial arc of the bank survived, running from the north-west to the north-east and standing to about 1.5 metres in height, with a curved extent of around 40 metres. The remainder had already been lost, likely to centuries of agriculture on what is otherwise fairly level, workable ground. What once enclosed a household and its activities has been reduced, above ground at least, to a fragment, and then to nothing the eye can catch.

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Pete F
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