Ringfort, Coolmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
In the flat, waterlogged pasture of Coolmore in County Tipperary, a roughly circular earthwork sits in a state of considerable disorder.
The perimeter is choked with thorn bushes and brambles, the interior humped with grassy mounds, and a pond occupies part of the southern sector, apparently the result of quarrying activity that also left upcast material piled on the bank nearby. What was once a legible early medieval enclosure has been pulled and pushed in several directions at once, leaving something that requires a little patience to read.
A ringfort is a circular enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or high-status residence during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Coolmore example measures approximately 65 metres in diameter on a north-northwest to south-southeast axis, defined by a bank around 3.5 metres wide and an external fosse, or ditch, originally around 1.8 to 2 metres across. By the time of the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, the enclosure was already recorded as somewhat smaller, at around 53 metres in diameter, which suggests the outer edges had already begun to erode or be encroached upon by then. The western quadrant retains a gap of about 2.8 metres that would have served as an entrance, with a causeway still traceable across the fosse at that point. Elsewhere, the fosse in the northern, eastern, and southern quadrants has been recut into a deep, steep-sided field drain, waterlogged and little resembling its original form. Heaps of dumped earth along the inner edge of the bank in the northeast add another layer of disturbance to the picture.
The site sits on flat ground with woodland to the south and rough wet pasture around it, which gives some sense of how marginal and easily overlooked it might feel to a passing visitor. The brambles and overgrowth that now define the perimeter make close inspection difficult, though the causeway gap on the western side remains one of the more intelligible features on the ground.