Ringfort (Rath), Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

Most ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, sit on elevated ground, their raised banks making a clear statement across the landscape.

The rath at Boherygeela does something different. It occupies wet, low-lying pasture in County Limerick, the kind of ground that waterlogged surveyors and farmers have historically avoided, and yet it is not one enclosure but two conjoined ones, pressed together into a sprawling double platform that stretches roughly 145 metres along its long axis. The 1897 Ordnance Survey map labelled it simply as an 'Entrenchment', which rather undersells the complexity of what is actually there.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and described the site in 1920, noting that despite its unassuming position it commanded distant views of Knockfirina, Tory Hill, and the Galtee Mountains. He recorded the western component as a mound measuring roughly 58 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west, terraced above the surrounding field by about 1.2 to 1.5 metres, with a levelled parapet colonised by large hawthorns and no surviving stone facing. The eastern wing, more irregular in shape and surrounded by a wet fosse, a ditch intended to define and defend the enclosure, retained an outer mound on its northern side that Westropp measured at between 2.7 and 3.6 metres thick and rising 1.5 to 2.1 metres above the fosse floor. The north cusp, where the two platforms meet at an angle crowded with hawthorns, he considered well preserved. A later description by O'Kelly in 1944 was less generous, finding no surviving banks at all, only the fosses themselves, varying between 4.5 and 9 metres in width and roughly 1.5 metres deep, with the entrance no longer recognisable.

The site lies in wet pasture about 40 metres north of the townland boundary with Crean, and the immediately surrounding landscape is dense with related monuments. A conjoined ringfort sits directly to the west, an enclosure lies 70 metres to the northeast, and the ringfort known as Lisduffnacrean is approximately 345 metres to the southwest. Aerial photographs taken in September 2002 and orthophotographs from between 2005 and 2012 show the fosses still legible from above, with a linear drain feeding into the fosse at the northeast corner. On the ground, the wet conditions that define the site are present year-round, so appropriate footwear matters. The hawthorns Westropp admired at the north cusp remain the most immediately visible feature, marking the angle between the two platforms in a way that centuries of agricultural use have not entirely erased.

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