Ringfort (Rath), Kilclooney, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Ringforts
High on a shelf of the Comeragh Mountains, overlooking a col between the mountain mass and Croughaun Hill to the east, a small circular enclosure sits quietly under heather. It measures roughly twenty metres across, defined by a stone-walled bank that still stands between half a metre and just over a metre high on the exterior, with traces of a fosse, a defensive ditch, running around its eastern, southern, and northern sides. There are gaps in the perimeter at the south-east and west, yet no identifiable entrance has been found, which gives the whole structure a faintly inscrutable quality.
A rath is a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, typically a circular enclosure defined by earthen or stone banks and used as a farmstead and place of residence during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Most raths occupy productive lowland ground, so the position of this one, high on a mountain shelf with a commanding view of the col below, is not entirely typical. What makes the site additionally interesting is a discrepancy in the cartographic record. When Ordnance Survey mappers recorded it in 1840, they noted an external diameter of around twenty-five metres. By the 1927 edition of the same six-inch map, that figure had grown to somewhere between thirty-five and forty metres, a difference too large to be explained by surveying tolerances alone and one that raises quiet questions about what, exactly, was being measured, or whether the monument had been altered or misread in the intervening decades. A further recorded structure, classified simply as a house, sits approximately thirty-five metres to the south.