Ringfort, Poulavone, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Ringforts
At Poulavone, on the lower slopes where the Comeragh Mountains begin to flatten into the surrounding farmland, there is a ringfort that has effectively ceased to exist as a visible thing. It cannot be seen from ground level. The tillage that now covers the site has reduced whatever once stood here to nothing the eye can catch, and yet the enclosure is recorded, measured, and mapped.
Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically associated with farming families of some local standing. The one at Poulavone was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1840, which shows a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres in diameter. Even then, the bank was only partially traceable, surviving along the north-east to south-west arc. The site sits on level ground at the north-east-facing foothills of the Comeraghs, a position that would have offered reasonable agricultural land and some shelter from the prevailing weather. By the time the enclosure was assessed more recently, centuries of ploughing had done their work, and what the nineteenth-century surveyors could still partially outline has since been subsumed entirely into the field surface above it.