Ringfort, Newbarn, Co. Dublin

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Ringforts

Ringfort, Newbarn, Co. Dublin

A roughly circular earthen platform sitting quietly in a field of pastureland near the Broadmeadow river is easy to walk past without registering what it actually is.

At around seventy metres in diameter and rising about a metre and a half above the surrounding ground, this ringfort at Newbarn in County Dublin is substantial enough to be unmistakable once you know to look for it, yet the landscape has done a reasonable job of absorbing it. The outer earthen bank, about three metres wide and just over a metre high, still traces most of the circuit, and a ditch remains visible around the base except on the southern side, where the ground falls away toward the road and the river.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period and thought to have served as enclosed farmsteads for families of some local standing. The earthen bank and ditch combination would have provided a degree of security for livestock as much as for people. The Newbarn example follows the general form well, though its profile on the downslope side has spread and flattened somewhat over the centuries, a process that would have been accelerated by the sloping ground falling southward. The northern section has also been disturbed. At some point, trees were planted around the perimeter, a relatively common Victorian or post-medieval intervention at such sites, but several of those trees have since been removed, leaving large holes and rotten stumps that now mark the line where the planting once stood. The immediate area to the south-east has been extensively quarried, which has altered the surrounding landscape considerably. The site was compiled by Geraldine Stout and updated by Christine Baker.

The fort sits in agricultural land, so access will depend on local conditions and landowner permissions. The sloping ground means that the structure reads differently depending on which side you approach from; the northern and western sides give the clearest sense of the bank's height, while the southern face, splayed by gravity and drainage over many generations, is noticeably less pronounced. The stumps and hollows left by the removed trees are themselves worth noting as a small record of how these monuments have been managed, planted over, and then partially cleared again across recent centuries.

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Newbarn, Co. Dublin
53.49010821,-6.32585391

Ref: DU00345

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