Ringfort (Rath), Clogher East, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
There is nothing left to see at this ringfort in Clogher East, Co. Limerick, and that near-total absence is itself the point.
What was once a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across, surrounded by a bank and a water-filled fosse, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the working farmland around it that aerial photography taken between 2005 and 2012 recorded no surface remains at all. By 2020, a farmyard had been built across the northern quadrant of the site, and a farm track cuts through its eastern edge. A field that the Ordnance Survey mappers of 1840 knew simply as Crow Field now shows almost no trace of what once stood there.
Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a farmstead and its livestock. This particular example was noted on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1840 and appeared again on the twenty-five inch edition of 1897, which recorded a bank running from the south-east around to the north, reduced to a mere scarp on the remaining sides, with an outer fosse. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1916 to 1917, mentioned the broader cluster in Clogher East, referring to two conjoined forts and two more close by, suggesting this was once a landscape with a meaningful concentration of such enclosures. The last proper field survey was carried out by Henry A. Wheeler on 27 May 1970, ahead of land reclamation works. His notes describe a slight raised area barely visible from the south and west, with an external fosse between 1.8 and 2.4 metres wide and around 0.6 metres deep. Even then, it was poorly preserved.
For anyone curious enough to look, the site lies in improved pasture approximately forty-five metres west of a large enclosure recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record. The 2006 Google Earth orthoimage still shows a partial outline, a ghostly arc in the field pattern, though subsequent images show that even this has faded. There is no public access as such, the land is private farmland, and the monument is a levelled one. The interest here is less in visiting and more in understanding how quickly a feature that survived from the early medieval period into the twentieth century can disappear once agricultural pressure intensifies. Wheeler's 1970 survey, conducted precisely because reclamation was imminent, turns out to have been the last real record of a monument that is now, in any physical sense, gone.