Ringfort (Rath), Cormackstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cormackstown, Co. Tipperary

Around 1973, according to the landowner, a piece of early medieval Ireland was deliberately levelled in the pastureland of Cormackstown in County Tipperary.

And yet it did not disappear. Decades later, the ringfort, a rath, meaning a roughly circular enclosure of earth and timber that would typically have housed a farming family and their livestock during the early medieval period, remains visible as a raised platform sitting quietly in the undulating grassland, its outline still legible to anyone who knows how to look.

The platform measures approximately 41 metres north to south and 37.5 metres east to west, and it is defined by a gradually sloping scarp rising just over a metre in height. Beyond that, a shallow outer fosse, essentially a ditch, runs around the perimeter, still surviving to a width of five metres despite the levelling. Perhaps most intriguing is a suggestion of a causeway in the south-east sector, also around five metres wide, which would have been the original entrance point across the fosse and into the enclosed farmstead. A second ringfort lies a short distance to the south-east, hinting that this part of north Tipperary was once a more densely settled landscape than the open pasture now suggests.

What makes this site quietly interesting is precisely the tension between what was done to it and what endures. Levelling a ringfort is not unusual in the Irish agricultural record; thousands were removed during the twentieth century as field systems were consolidated and machinery made it feasible. What remains here is the kind of earthwork that rewards a slow walk across the field rather than a quick glance from a distance, the slight rise underfoot, the faint hollow of the fosse, the almost imperceptible change in gradient that traces the shape of a dwelling long gone.

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Pete F
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