Ringfort, Coolnacrutta, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Coolnacrutta, Co. Kilkenny

What survives of this ringfort in Coolnacrutta, County Kilkenny, is less a monument than an argument for how quickly the landscape absorbs its own past.

A roughly rectangular interior platform, approximately 25 metres by 30 metres and rising about 1.2 metres above the road, is the only legible remnant of what was once a complete enclosure. The earthwork that would have defined it as a ringfort, an embanked circular or oval enclosure of the kind built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead, has been eaten away on every side.

The damage reads almost like a ledger of rural activity across the centuries. To the north, a road has cut through the enclosing bank; to the south, a farm track has done the same. Farm buildings have encroached on the western quadrant. To the east, the bank was quarried away in association with a lime kiln, a structure once common on Irish farms for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime. Each intrusion was, no doubt, practical and unremarkable at the time, a new track here, an outbuilding there, a source of raw material for improving the soil. Together they have reduced a monument that may be over a thousand years old to a slightly raised patch of grassland sitting between two working farmyards on the flat floor of the Goul river valley. The interior survives roughly level with the surrounding ground to the south and west, which makes it easy to overlook entirely unless you already know what you are standing in.

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Pete F
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