Ringfort (Rath), Curraghscarteen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ringforts
What once occupied a south-facing slope in Curraghscarteen, Co. Kilkenny no longer has any physical presence in the landscape, yet what was uncovered here in 1952 offers a quietly revealing window into early Irish life.
The site was a bivallate ringfort, meaning it was enclosed not by one but by two concentric earthen banks with corresponding ditches, or fosses, between them. An interior diameter of roughly 32 metres and an overall spread of nearly 49 metres made it a substantial example of the type, the kind of enclosed settlement that would have been home to a farming household of some status during the early medieval period. By the time archaeologists arrived, decades of field drainage had been directed into the low-lying area around the fort, leaving the fosses waterlogged and large sections of the ground sodden.
Excavations were carried out in 1952 by Gearóid Ó hIceadha of the Office of Public Works, prompted by Land Project works that were reshaping agricultural land across the country at the time. The dig had to go deeper than originally planned in places, owing to the saturated conditions. What it produced was modest in quantity but telling in character: several pieces of unworked iron, fragments of two iron knives, a whetstone, and two subsoil pits with an arrangement of stones that Ó hIceadha interpreted as the remains of a furnace. Iron working at a ringfort site points to a degree of self-sufficiency and craft activity within the enclosure, whether that meant producing tools for everyday agricultural use or repairing blades. Detailed measured plans and profiles of the monument, recorded in correspondence from May and June of that year, preserve what the ground itself no longer can.
The fort has since been levelled entirely, absorbed back into the surrounding pasture. Faint traces are said to be detectable on satellite imagery, but there is nothing left to visit in the conventional sense. The site's interest lies less in any surviving fabric and more in what those 1952 excavations caught before it disappeared: evidence of a small community working iron on a wet hillside in Kilkenny, sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium.
