Ringfort (Rath), Rathreagh, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rathreagh, Co. Kilkenny

Sitting on a low north-south ridge in the Goul river valley in County Kilkenny, this rath presents a quiet puzzle: after more than a thousand years in the landscape, nobody can say where you were supposed to walk in.

No original entrance survives, or at least none is visible above ground, which gives the enclosure a faintly sealed quality, as though it has simply decided to keep its own counsel.

A rath is an earthen ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead for a single family or small household. This one follows the classic form: a roughly circular interior about fifty metres across, thrown up behind an earthen bank and separated from the world by an external fosse, which is a ditch dug to heighten the effective height of the bank above it. Here there is also an intermittent outer bank beyond the fosse, giving the enclosure a double-ringed profile in places, a feature associated with higher-status sites. The interior is largely level, though modern quarry holes have been cut into the northern and eastern sides; the eastern one has since been largely infilled. The land beyond the eastern edge falls away sharply to a small stream, and the surrounding fields, many of them reclaimed and some cultivated, stretch away across the undulating grassland of the valley floor in every direction.

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Pete F
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