Ringfort (Rath), Knocknamena Commons, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knocknamena Commons, Co. Tipperary

On the east-facing slope of a hill at Knocknamena Commons, a pair of concentric earthen rings marks out a space that has been quietly folded into the working farmland around it.

The outer bank on the western, northern, and north-eastern sides has been absorbed into a modern field boundary, so the enclosure now does double duty, simultaneously an early medieval monument and a functional division of pasture. That kind of blurring, where the ancient and the agricultural simply merge without ceremony, is fairly common across the Irish midlands, but it still carries a particular strangeness when you trace the line and realise the hedge you are looking at is roughly fourteen hundred years old at its core.

The site is a bivallate rath, meaning it has two defensive circuits rather than the single bank and fosse found on most ringforts. Ringforts, broadly speaking, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, used as homesteads and for the protection of livestock; the bivallate variety is generally thought to indicate a household of higher social standing or greater wealth. Here, the inner enclosure is oval, measuring about 40.7 metres north to south and 34.5 metres east to west, and is defined by a bank, a U-shaped fosse (a flat-bottomed or rounded ditch), and a second outer bank beyond that. The causewayed entrance on the eastern side, a gap in the earthworks wide enough to have served as a formal approach, measures 4.3 metres across, though it may have been widened at some point to accommodate tractor access, a practical adjustment that is itself a small footnote in the long life of the place.

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Pete F
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