Ringfort (Rath), Ashwell'S-Lot, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ashwell’S-Lot, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a cul-de-sac in a modern housing estate in County Tipperary, there is an early medieval ringfort that most of its neighbours almost certainly know nothing about.

There is no mound, no earthwork, no interpretive sign. The site was first identified not by anyone walking the ground but by an aerial photograph taken in April 1974, on which the outline of the enclosure appeared as an oval cropmark, the kind of ghost impression left when buried ditches alter the growth of vegetation above them. The Rock of Cashel, one of the most recognisable monuments in Munster, would once have been visible to the north from this elevated slope; today the housing blocks that view entirely.

Excavations carried out in 1997 and 1998 uncovered a shallow external fosse, the ditch that typically encircled a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, measuring roughly two metres wide and 0.4 metres deep. Further excavation of the bank in 1998 revealed something more layered: three distinct generations of bank and ditch, suggesting the site was modified and reused over a long period. The earliest phases are consistent with a ringfort, and the primary fill of that earliest ditch contained bone and charcoal, indicating human occupation somewhere nearby. Post-holes found on top of the bank point to a timber palisade or fence. No datable finds were recovered from the two earliest phases, leaving the chronology frustratingly open, but the latest phase of construction, which used a stone-revetted bank and ditch, was associated with post-medieval material, suggesting the site continued to be used or reworked well after the medieval period. The ringfort was likely around 56 metres in diameter. Some of that outline persists, ghostlike, in the administrative landscape: a curving kink in the townland boundary to the south follows the arc of the old enclosure, and a curved field boundary to the west, still visible on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and on the 1952 to 1954 revision, appears to have respected or incorporated the western edge of the monument.

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Pete F
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