Ringfort (Rath), Ballyfookeen, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Somewhere in the pastureland of Ballyfookeen, a south-facing hill slope in County Limerick holds a small circular enclosure that has spent the better part of a century quietly disappearing beneath thorn and briars.
What was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built between the early medieval period and around 1000 AD and defined by one or more earthen banks, now sits almost entirely swallowed by dense scrub. The irony is that the field boundaries around it have actually preserved its outline, forming a rough square of hedging that contains the circular earthwork within, like a frame drawn around something the landscape decided to keep to itself.
The site appears on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular embanked enclosure with a diameter of approximately twenty metres, which places it at the smaller end of the ringfort scale. Compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011, the survey notes describe conditions that suggest the monument has seen little management in living memory. A rubbish-filled depression runs along the eastern side, roughly 2.6 metres wide, sitting between the enclosure itself and the adjacent field boundary. Whether this dip represents a degraded outer ditch or simply accumulated collapse and dumping over the decades is not recorded. Only at the east-south-east is any portion of the external bank face still accessible, rising to about one metre in height, which gives at least a modest impression of what the original earthwork would have looked like when it defined someone's home ground more than a thousand years ago.
Access to the interior is, frankly, not realistic. The cover of thorn and briars noted in the survey makes it effectively impenetrable, and the encircling field boundaries add another layer of difficulty. What a visitor can do is approach along the field margins and locate the ESE section of the bank, the one legible fragment the vegetation has not entirely claimed. The surrounding pasture and the gentle fall of the hill southward give some sense of why this spot was chosen in the first place, commanding a modest but useful view of the terrain below. The site carries no signage and no formal access, so landowner permission would be the necessary first step before attempting to get close.