Ringfort (Rath), Brickendown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A few dozen metres from another of its kind, this ringfort at Brickendown sits quietly in improved pasture on a gentle east-facing slope, its circular outline only partly legible to the eye.
What makes it quietly odd is not any single feature but the combination of partial survival and active modification: the earthen bank that once defined the enclosure is visible in places to the south-west, north-east, and south-east, but elsewhere it has disappeared entirely under dense vegetation. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically circular, bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and almost certainly the most common archaeological monument type in the Irish landscape.
The enclosure measures roughly 26 metres north to south and 24 metres east to west, a modest but typical domestic scale. The bank, where it survives, has an overall width of around five and a half metres and stands just under a metre and a half in external height. A possible entrance gap of about four and a half metres opens at the south, with a separate breach in the bank to the east. The surrounding fosse, the external ditch that accompanies the bank, runs roughly north-east to south-west but has been altered: at its north-eastern end it has been deepened for agricultural drainage, a modification that has effectively truncated the original ditch to the west and north. This kind of pragmatic reshaping of ancient earthworks for farmland management is not unusual, but it does mean that the monument's original form is now only partially recoverable. The interior slopes gently to the south and has been planted with young oak saplings, giving it an odd, purposeful quality quite different from the rough grazing that surrounds it.
A second ringfort lies approximately 28 metres to the east-south-east, close enough that the two enclosures may once have formed part of the same agricultural or social landscape, though what that relationship looked like in practice is not recorded. The vegetation covering much of the bank means the earthwork reads better from certain angles than others, and the drainage works to the north-east are the most visibly intrusive element on the ground.