Ringfort (Rath), Glenbane, Co. Tipperary

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Glenbane, Co. Tipperary

A low ring of earth in a Tipperary field might not announce itself as anything in particular, but the rath at Glenbane is a quietly legible remnant of early medieval rural life, its encircling bank still tracing out a roughly circular area of around eighteen metres across.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early Christian Ireland, typically built to define and protect a family's living space, livestock, and status. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, and this one sits on a south-facing slope in gently undulating pasture, still holding its shape after more than a thousand years.

The enclosing bank survives in different forms around the circuit. To the north-north-west and east-north-east it remains as a proper earthen bank, nearly four metres wide, though its internal height has been worn to little more than thirty centimetres. Elsewhere it has been reduced to a scarp, a simple cut in the ground rather than a raised feature, reaching about a metre and two tenths externally in places. A fosse, the term for the outer ditch that would originally have accompanied the bank, survives on the western and northern arc, around six metres wide and half a metre deep. Briars obscure much of the enclosing elements to the north-east and south, and cattle have eroded the scarp on the south-east and south sides, with a clear breach of about one and a half metres visible at the south-west. A possible original entrance, roughly four metres wide, may be identified at the north-west. Extending outward from that same north-west point is a scarp about twenty-six metres long running roughly east to west, representing a scar of an old field boundary that was already visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1843, suggesting the surrounding landscape has been organised and reorganised around this older feature for a very long time.

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