Ringfort (Rath), Knockandarragh, Co. Wicklow

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knockandarragh, Co. Wicklow

Two ringforts sitting side by side is not something you encounter every day in the Irish landscape.

At Knockandarragh in County Wicklow, a subcircular rath of roughly 28 metres in diameter occupies the southern face of an east-west ridge, and immediately to its north-east sits a second, known as Mulladarragh rath. The two are effectively neighbours, their earthworks abutting one another in a configuration that makes this small ridge worth a second look.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular or near-circular, formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and most likely used as a farmstead and dwelling place. The Knockandarragh example is modest in scale but clear enough in outline to have been recorded on both editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as well as the more detailed twenty-five-inch series, meaning it has been a legible feature of the landscape for well over a century. What survives today includes a portion of the original bank, positioned almost directly opposite the south-western entrance to the adjoining Mulladarragh rath. That spatial relationship, one rath's surviving bank aligning with another's entrance, hints at the possibility that the two enclosures were in some way planned or used in relation to each other, though the historical record offers no firm answer on that point.

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