Ringfort (Rath), Fahee, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Fahee, Co. Clare

On a ridge above the 600-foot contour in County Clare, a roughly oval earthwork sits in rough pasture with a wide view over a fertile valley to the north-west.

It is not much to look at now, the enclosing stony bank barely rising above ankle height on the interior, though its outer face still manages between one and one and a half metres in places. What gives the site its quiet interest is less the monument itself than its relationship to the landscape around it: grassed-over field walls radiate outward from the rath at three compass points, north-east, south-south-west, and north-west, ghostly extensions of an agricultural system that was already ancient when the ringfort was in use.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, formed by an earthen or stony bank and used as a farmstead or small defended homestead. The Fahee example measures approximately 57 metres north to south and 44 metres across, with a bank about two metres wide. Its interior slopes gently downward to the north. The site sits within what surveyors describe as an extensive multi-period field system, meaning the walls and boundaries here were laid down, altered, and re-used across several distinct eras of occupation. The ringfort was already being mapped by the first Ordnance Survey in 1842, appearing on the six-inch sheet with the hachuring that cartographers used to indicate earthworks, and it was recorded again on the Cassini edition of the same map in 1920. By 1996 it had been listed in the Record of Monuments and Places, though catalogued there under the somewhat flat designation of "Enclosure", a label that rather undersells the density of human activity its surroundings suggest.

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