Ringfort (Rath), Tomcool Little, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ringforts
In a field in Tomcool Little, County Wexford, the ground gives itself away only slightly.
A shallow circular depression, roughly 32 metres across and covered in grass, marks the ghost of an early medieval ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once defined the Irish rural landscape in its thousands. From the air, the tell is clearer: a cropmark traces the full circle, approximately 35 metres in diameter, the buried ditches and banks causing crops or grass above them to grow at a subtly different rate and colour than the surrounding soil.
Ringforts, also known as raths, were typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, serving as enclosed homesteads for farming families of varying social rank. They usually consisted of a circular area surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, sometimes topped with a timber palisade. The Tomcool Little example sits on a broad, low spur of land running roughly north to south, a modest but deliberate elevation that would have offered its inhabitants a degree of visibility across the surrounding terrain. The site is one of many such features scattered across County Wexford, a county with a dense archaeological record from the early medieval period.