Ringfort (Rath), Glashare, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Glashare, Co. Kilkenny

There is something quietly deliberate about the position of this earthwork in Glashare.

It sits at the highest point where the southern edge of the Rathlogan river valley meets the eastern side of the Goul valley, a junction that would have made it visible from considerable distance and would have given its occupants a commanding view across rolling grassland to the north, south, and west. Only the eastward sightline is compromised, blocked by a gentle rise of land before the ground falls again into the valley below. That kind of placement was rarely accidental.

The structure itself is a rath, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Raths are ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period, from around the fifth to the twelfth century, and used mainly as farmsteads for a single family or small community. This example takes the form of a circular interior roughly thirty-five metres across, enclosed by a low earthen bank about two metres wide, standing less than a metre high on the interior side and just over a metre on the exterior. Beyond the bank runs a fosse, an external ditch, also around two metres wide, though now very shallow, only ten to twenty centimetres deep. The overall form survives, but the interior offers no clearly defined features to read, its surface irregular without any obvious structures remaining.

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