Ringfort (Rath), Garrankyle, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Garrankyle, Co. Tipperary

Someone dug a large pit inside this ringfort, probably at some point in the twentieth century, and never found what they were looking for.

The hole, roughly 16 metres by 10 metres and 1.3 metres deep, still sits in the northern sector of the interior, a quiet record of frustrated excavation. Local tradition holds that a souterrain lies somewhere beneath the enclosure, and the digging appears to have been an attempt to locate it. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or as a place of refuge. Whether the souterrain exists at all remains unresolved.

The ringfort itself sits just below the crest of a hill on an east-facing slope in Garrankyle, with a river running between 70 and 100 metres to the north and east. Its shape is unusual: broadly subrectangular, nearly pentagonal, with a mix of straight and curving sides measuring roughly 42 metres north to south and 34.6 metres east to west. The enclosure is defined by a substantial earthen bank, a wide flat-bottomed fosse (the ditch between the bank and an outer scarp), and that outer scarp itself, which along the northern, eastern, and southern sides is topped by a field boundary that may incorporate a second, outer bank. The bank faces on either side of the fosse have been worn down by cattle over the years, and old badger sets have been dug into the earthworks. There are two possible original entrances, one in the northwest quadrant and one in the southeast, though the northwest opening has no corresponding break in the outer scarp, which rises quite high at that point, leaving its original function uncertain.

The interior is now heavily overgrown, with trees around the bank and large bramble bushes throughout. A spring is said to lie somewhere in the southwest of the interior depression, and the ground in that area remains noticeably wet. The cattle gap cut into the southwest quadrant is a more recent practical addition, and the overall impression of the monument today is of earthworks half-claimed by vegetation, with that unexplained excavation still open in the north, waiting on a tradition that has yet to be confirmed or disproved.

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Pete F
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