Ringfort (Rath), Grange Upper, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A roughly circular earthwork sits in the northern corner of a field in Grange Upper, its outer ditch partly eaten away by a farm laneway and a public road, and its south-western bank levelled flat so that cattle or machinery can pass through.
What remains is still legible as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, consisting of a raised circular bank, sometimes with one or more outer ditches, enclosing a domestic or agricultural space. This one, with an internal diameter of roughly 31 metres and an external diameter of around 50 metres, sits at the more substantial end of the everyday scale, and its original causewayed entrance, a deliberate gap left in the ditch with a solid approach across it, was about 5 metres wide and faced south.
The monument appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, depicted as a circular bank with a farmyard road to the north-west and a public road to the east, which suggests the surrounding infrastructure was already working against it even then. By the time the more detailed 25-inch map was produced in 1897, surveyors had recorded both the bank and the outer ditch clearly, along with the causewayed southern entrance. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2020, drawing on historical mapping and Digital Globe satellite imagery from 2011 to 2013, as well as a Google Earth photograph taken in November 2019. A possible second enclosure has been identified approximately 160 metres to the west, though its status remains uncertain.
The site sits in the northern corner of a field bounded by roads on three sides, which makes it straightforward to locate but not straightforward to approach. The outer ditch is disturbed along the north-west and eastern edges where the laneway and road run close, so the most informative section to look for is the southern arc, where the causewayed entrance gap may still be traceable in the ground. The interior is used as ordinary farmland. Aerial and satellite views, including the Google Earth orthophoto from 2019, show the circular outline more clearly than ground level inspection is likely to, and that overhead perspective is worth consulting before visiting to understand the scale of what survives.
