Ringfort (Rath), Cush, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cush, Co. Limerick

A field in rough pasture on the slopes of Slievereagh in County Limerick sits on ground the early medieval world knew as Temaír Erann, the supposed ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe.

This is not a single monument but part of a dense archaeological complex, and the ringfort known to excavators as Ring-Fort No. 2 is one node within a cluster of conjoined earthworks, field systems, and a souterrain, the whole spread across the southern flank of the hill. A ringfort, to give the basic shape of it, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an external ditch, called a fosse, used across early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or place of habitation. What makes this particular example quietly compelling is how thoroughly the excavation record captures the layered, accidental quality of how people actually lived inside one.

Seán P. Ó Ríordáin excavated the site between 1934 and 1935, publishing his findings in 1940. He found the entrance on the western side of the fort, a gap roughly 4.26 metres wide where the fosse simply stopped, leaving a passage through. Just inside, and slightly to the south of the entrance, lay the remains of a small house, its pebble floor buried about 0.6 metres beneath the surface, sealed there by the gradual inward collapse of the bank. At the centre of the fort was a stone-lined hearth, a flat-slabbed construction roughly 76 centimetres by 60 centimetres, whose interior held a shallow deposit of charcoal, humified soil, burnt clay, and a scattering of calcined, that is, heat-fractured, bone fragments. Surrounding the hearth was a scatter of post-holes in no legible plan, which Ó Ríordáin interpreted as evidence of several successive structures built on the same spot. A group of four post-holes found actually within the hearth confirmed the sequence: the hearth had outlasted at least one of the buildings around it. Several pits filled with humified soil were also recorded, presumed to be storage pits, though nothing found inside them confirmed that reading. The ringfort was placed under Preservation Order 34 on 23 January 1935, during the excavation period itself.

The monument sits in rough pasture and forms part of a much larger archaeological landscape that repays careful attention on approach. A post-1700 field boundary running east to west cuts across the northern edge of the fort, and the contrast between the better-preserved northern portion and the more denuded southern section is a detail Ó Ríordáin himself noted as instructive about the general condition of ringfort banks across the area. The circular form remains visible on aerial imagery as a fosse truncated at the north by that later boundary. The wider complex, which includes conjoined ringforts to the south and a souterrain in the south-eastern quadrant, means that a visit rewards slow movement across the ground rather than attention to any single feature.

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