Ringfort, Donaghmore, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Donaghmore, Co. Kilkenny

A ringfort sitting on a gravel ridge above a flat valley floor sounds commanding enough, but this one in Donaghmore, Co. Kilkenny, has spent decades losing the argument against quarrying, road-building, and the slow absorption of its outer earthworks into field boundaries.

What survives is only a partial version of what was once there, and even working out what that was requires a degree of archaeological detective work.

Ringforts are roughly circular enclosures, typically of early medieval date, that once served as farmstead enclosures across Ireland. This example was bivallate, meaning it had two concentric enclosing elements rather than one, which generally indicates a site of some status. The outer enclosure sat close and largely concentric with the inner one along the eastern, southern, and south-western arc, but widened considerably to the north, extending approximately twenty metres beyond the inner enclosure in that direction. By the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map was made in 1839, the northern half of this outer enclosure had already been swallowed into the surrounding field boundaries. The inner enclosure was a roughly circular raised platform, somewhere between forty-two and forty-seven metres in diameter and standing about 1.8 metres high, with traces of a slight earthen bank and the remains of an external fosse, a defensive ditch approximately 2.5 metres wide and 0.8 metres deep, still visible on the eastern side. By 1987, the western half of the inner enclosure had been destroyed by quarrying, and a roadway had cut through the southern sector. What the 1839 map recorded as a coherent double-ringed earthwork had, within a century and a half, been reduced to a fragmentary outline, legible in parts but missing too much to read as a whole.

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