Ringfort (Rath), Kilcunnahin Beg, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilcunnahin Beg, Co. Tipperary

A row of mature beech trees planted along the inner edge of an ancient earthen bank is not what you would typically expect from an early medieval farmstead, and yet that is precisely what greets anyone who looks closely at this roughly oval enclosure on the grounds of Clifton House in Kilcunnahin Beg.

The trees suggest the site was repurposed at some point as a tree-ring, a common post-medieval practice of planting ornamental or shelter belts of trees within the ready-made circular boundary of an older earthwork. The original structure is considerably older, and the two uses of the same ground sit in quiet, slightly odd coexistence.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a class of enclosed settlement that was built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts functioned as farmsteads, their earthen banks and external ditches providing a degree of security for the household and its livestock within. This particular example sits on a south-facing slope in rolling pastureland and measures roughly 48 metres north to south and 54.7 metres east to west. Its enclosing bank is about nine metres wide, standing some two metres high on its outer face though reduced to a simple scarp on the western side. Beyond the bank runs an outer fosse, a drainage or defensive ditch, roughly six metres across and half a metre deep. No original entrance can be made out. The interior has not been left undisturbed: a silage pit occupies the south-western quadrant and mounds of dumped material sit in the south-eastern corner, evidence of the site's ongoing life as working farmland even as its prehistoric bones remain legible underfoot.

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Pete F
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