Lalisheen, Knockboy, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Ringforts

Lalisheen, Knockboy, Co. Waterford

At the crest of a steep western bank above the Lalisheen stream, a ring of earth sits quietly beneath a plantation of conifers. It is a ringfort, or at least the remains of one, and what gives it a particular quality of quiet strangeness is the way it has contracted over time, at least on paper. The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across; by 1927, the same feature had been reduced in the cartographic record to a mere fragment of bank on the southern arc. The ground itself tells a more complete story than either survey suggested.

What survives today is a roughly circular area approximately twenty-two metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank that measures five and a half metres wide, rising about ninety centimetres on the interior and one and a half metres on the exterior. A ringfort of this kind, an enclosed circular settlement typically of early medieval date, would normally be accompanied by a fosse, the external ditch from which the bank material was dug. Here, no fosse is visible. The entrance, three metres wide, faces south-southeast. On the northern to southeastern arc, the enclosure is defined not by bank but by a natural scarp, which may explain in part why the feature reads so differently depending on the angle from which it is approached. The site sits directly above the deep, north-south gorge carved by the Lalisheen stream, a position that would have offered both natural defensive advantage and a reliable water source.

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Pete F
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