Ringfort (Rath), Kilcommon More, Co. Tipperary

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilcommon More, Co. Tipperary

On a gentle hillside in Kilcommon More, a ringfort has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

The only hint that anything was ever here is a small, irregular kink in a field boundary to the north-east, the kind of anomaly a farmer or casual walker might pass a dozen times without a second thought. What was once a substantial circular enclosure, roughly 48 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, is now reclaimed pastureland with no earthwork, no bank, and no obvious trace of the past.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period, consisting of a raised earthen bank surrounding a domestic or agricultural interior. By the time the first Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1840, the ringfort at Kilcommon More appeared not as an earthen monument but as a conspicuous circular patch of woodland, suggesting the enclosure had already been colonised by trees and was no longer in agricultural use. By the second edition map of 1906, it was recorded again, this time as an earthen monument. When an inspector visited in 1969, the picture was considerably bleaker: the ground was described as trampled and disturbed, and the bank, where it could be detected at all, stood only about 1.2 metres high. The site had been included in Land Project works, a mid-twentieth-century state-led scheme of agricultural improvement that involved draining, levelling, and reclaiming marginal land across Ireland, and which is known to have disturbed or destroyed a significant number of archaeological monuments in its wake. That visit in 1969 appears to have caught the ringfort in its final stages of erasure.

There is nothing to see here now in any conventional sense, which is precisely what makes the site quietly instructive. The kink in the field boundary is the monument's last legible signature, the kind of detail that rewards those who know how to read a landscape rather than simply look at it.

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Pete F
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