Ringfort (Rath), Hollywood, Co. Wicklow

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Hollywood, Co. Wicklow

On a steep west-facing slope in the rough ground near Hollywood, Co. Wicklow, a circular earthwork sits quietly among rock outcrops, its shape still legible despite centuries of agricultural interference.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a class of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the sixth and tenth centuries and once numbering in the tens of thousands across Ireland. This one measures roughly 27 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank somewhere between 2.7 and 3 metres wide and still standing about 0.7 metres high, a modest profile that belies the effort its original builders invested in the construction.

The eastern side retains slight traces of an external fosse, the shallow ditch from which material was dug to raise the surrounding bank, and a narrow gap of about one metre at the ENE may mark the original entrance to the enclosure. Field boundaries have not been kind to the site over the intervening centuries. A modern east-west field boundary cuts straight through the southern portion of the ringfort, and a track was at some point laid along the inner edge of the bank, running from where the field boundary meets the southwest of the circuit around to a modern gap at the northeast. The spoil thrown up during that track's construction now sits as an oval mound in the western quadrant, an accidental burial of sorts, adding a small topographic oddity to what was already an uneven, rocky setting. The cumulative effect is a site that has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape, its original geometry partially obscured but still, on close inspection, coherent.

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