Embanked enclosure, Tinnascart, Co. Waterford

A circular patch of grass in a County Waterford field, 27 metres across and almost perfectly round, does not announce itself as anything out of the ordinary. The field bank running along its northern edge looks like a thousand other Irish field banks. But fold back the agricultural overlay and what you find is an earthen enclosure of considerable age, its defining bank still standing to 1.3 metres in height, its outer fosse, a defensive ditch, still traceable for much of its southern arc at a width of around seven metres.

This kind of embanked enclosure is closely related to the rath, a class of monument familiar across Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Raths were built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of middling status. The Tinnascart enclosure sits on a gentle south-east-facing slope, a practical orientation that would have offered shelter and good drainage. The bank that survives to the north and north-east has been absorbed into a later field boundary, which is both the reason it still stands and the reason it is easy to overlook. To the south and south-west, traces of the fosse remain visible, and a change in vegetation marks the enclosure's western edge where other features have been lost. A fully recorded rath lies roughly 110 metres to the north-west, suggesting that this was once a landscape where enclosed settlements were spaced at intervals across the same hillside, each within sight or easy reach of its neighbour.