Ringfort (Rath), Ballytarsna, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballytarsna, Co. Tipperary

What makes this particular site in Ballytarsna unusual is not simply that it is a ringfort, those circular earthwork enclosures built throughout Ireland from the early medieval period onwards as farmsteads and settlement sites, but that it forms one half of a conjoined pair.

Two ringforts sit together here, linked by a causewayed entrance gap roughly three metres wide at the north-east, so that the larger enclosure effectively opens into its smaller northern neighbour. A third ringfort is visible on the ground roughly 130 metres to the north-east. Finding three in such close proximity is uncommon, and the deliberate joining of two of them points to a settlement of some complexity, perhaps a place where extended family groups or related households shared defensive ground.

The larger of the two conjoined enclosures measures approximately 25 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west internally. It is defined by an earth and stone bank, still standing to an external height of around 0.9 metres, which on its western side has been reduced to a scarp. Around both enclosures runs an outer fosse, a shallow ditch, with a base width of two metres and a top width of four. That outer ditch once encircled the full circuit of both ringforts, but a field boundary running north to south has cut through its eastern face and destroyed that portion of it. The boundary in question was already in place by the time of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map edition of 1953 to 1954, suggesting the damage is at least that old, though how much older is difficult to say. The low rise of ground on which all of this sits gives clear sightlines in every direction, which is typical of ringfort positioning and likely factored into why this particular knoll was chosen in the first place.

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