Ringfort (Rath), Donaghmore, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ringforts
On a natural terrace in County Kilkenny, poised between a river flood plain and the rising uplands, a circular earthwork sits quietly in level grassland, its presence easy to overlook until you notice how deliberately it commands the ground it occupies.
This is a rath, one of the thousands of ringforts scattered across Ireland, built as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The form is ancient and practical: a raised interior platform, ringed by an earthen bank and a fosse, the fosse being a wide external ditch that would have made any approach to the enclosure considerably more difficult.
The dimensions here are substantial. The roughly circular enclosure measures approximately 38 metres in diameter, and the earthen bank surrounding it runs four to five metres wide, rising to at least 2.5 metres on its outer face. Inside that bank, the ground sits around 1.4 to 1.8 metres above the fosse floor. The fosse itself is four to five metres across and about a metre deep. A single original entrance, three metres wide, opens to the north-east. The siting is deliberate; the terrace position gives clear views in all directions, which would have mattered greatly to whoever lived and farmed within these banks. The interior is now fairly heavily overgrown, which gives the earthwork a slightly untended quality, though the bank and fosse remain well defined.