Ringfort (Rath), Tiermore, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tiermore, Co. Limerick

Most people who walk past this particular field in Tiermore, County Limerick, would see nothing more than rough pasture on a gentle hillside.

What they would be missing is a ringfort, or rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive in the Irish landscape, yet each one tends to disappear into the countryside in its own particular way, and this one has done so very thoroughly indeed.

The site consists of a roughly circular enclosure about 31 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank with an external fosse, which is essentially a shallow ditch, running around its perimeter. The fosse here is modest, measuring around 0.2 metres deep and 1.5 metres wide, suggesting this was a settlement of fairly ordinary agricultural status rather than a high-ranking defended site. The bank itself stands to an external height of about 1.15 metres, though on the interior it barely registers, dropping to just 0.2 metres in places and becoming almost scarp-like in character. Much of it is now so heavily overgrown as to be difficult to read clearly. Cattle grazing on the slope have worn the bank down at the south-south-east and north-north-west, and at the north-north-east someone has tipped boulders cleared from the surrounding fields along the interior edge, a common fate for these sites in working farmland. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The fort sits on a south-east-facing slope that runs down towards a river valley, a position typical of these sites, which were often placed to catch morning light and to overlook productive lowland. The interior slopes gently downward to the south-east and is scattered with fallen tree limbs and loose stones. Because the enclosing bank is so heavily masked by vegetation, the fosse is probably the clearest feature to look for from the outside. Access would be across private farmland, so permission from the landowner would be the first practical step. The site is neither fenced off nor interpreted, and without some prior knowledge of what a degraded rath looks like in the field, it could be easy to walk across without quite registering what lies underfoot.

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Pete F
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