Ringfort, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

There is a ringfort in Baunmore, County Kilkenny, that you cannot see.

It sits on elevated ground with open views across rolling grassland, occupying the kind of prominent position that early medieval farmers and landowners consistently chose for these circular enclosures, which typically served as defended farmsteads. At roughly 31 metres in diameter, it was a fairly typical example of the form. Then land reclamation levelled it entirely, and it disappeared from the surface of the earth.

The enclosure was still legible on the 1900 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, recorded as a circular feature before agricultural improvement erased its physical presence. Today, a field boundary running north-east to south-west traces what was once the outer south-eastern edge of the monument, a faint cartographic ghost preserved in the modern landscape almost by accident. About 170 metres to the south-east, a cashel, which is a stone-walled ringfort rather than an earthen one, still survives at the same site reference KK009-033. The proximity of two such enclosures is itself worth noting; clusters of ringforts are not uncommon in Ireland, and often suggest the organisation of land and family groups across a shared territory during the early medieval period.

There is nothing to see at ground level, and that is precisely what makes the site quietly interesting. The monument exists now as a set of coordinates, a diameter on an old map, and the slight irregularity of a field boundary that has outlasted the structure it once bounded.

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Pete F
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