Ringfort (Rath), Dromin South, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Two ringforts within thirty metres of each other, sitting in the same wet pasture on the southern edge of Dromin South, is not the kind of arrangement that draws much attention.
Yet that proximity, two early medieval enclosed settlements so close as to almost be neighbours, makes this corner of County Limerick quietly worth pausing over. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and sometimes a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This particular example has fared less well than some.
The monument is recorded under the reference LI039-083 and was documented by Martin Fitzpatrick, with notes uploaded in April 2021. Its companion enclosure, LI039-082, lies just 30 metres to the southwest. The site appears on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map, where it is shown as a roughly oval shape, measuring approximately 40 metres northwest to southeast and 42 metres northeast to southwest. That near-circular outline was once enclosed by an earthen bank, though today that bank survives only along the eastern to western arc; elsewhere it has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low eroded slope in the ground. A partial external fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have ringed the outside of the bank, remains visible at the northeastern side only. Aerial photography taken by the ASI in January 2003 captured the site from above, and a Google Earth orthoimage from March 2016 still shows the outline of the monument, faint but traceable.
The site sits in wet pasture roughly 60 metres south of the townland boundary with Dromin North, which means underfoot conditions are likely to be soft for much of the year; summer visits will give firmer ground and better visibility of the low earthworks. The eroded bank is subtle enough that a visitor unfamiliar with reading field monuments might walk past without registering what they are looking at. The thing to look for is the gentle change in ground level, the curve of the scarp following the old perimeter, and at the northeast the faint hollow that marks the surviving fragment of the fosse. Knowing that a second ringfort lies just beyond in the same field makes the whole area feel slightly more considered, two enclosures in close company for reasons that remain, as with so much of early medieval rural life, unrecorded.