Ringfort (Rath), Ballinvilla, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A low, almost imperceptible rise in a field near Ballinvilla tells a story that centuries of ploughing and grazing have done their best to erase.
What survives of this early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically defined by one or more earthen banks and surrounding ditches, amounts to little more than a gentle circular swell in the pastureland, roughly thirty metres across on its north-south axis, with faint traces of what may once have been a fosse, or defensive ditch, along its western and south-eastern edges. The site tilts slightly westward with the natural lie of the ridge it occupies.
The fort sat on the crest of a north-south ridge in what is now undulating farmland, a position that would have made practical sense for anyone farming and living here during the early medieval period, when ringforts were in common use across Ireland. Its existence went unrecorded on both the first and second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, meaning it slipped through the documentary record entirely until aerial photography brought it back to light. A Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography image, catalogued as BDL 67, revealed the outline of the enclosure as a circular cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression left in vegetation when buried earthworks affect the soil's moisture and nutrients above them. That a site of this kind remained invisible to nineteenth-century mapmakers, only to reappear as a shadow in a photograph taken from the air, gives a reasonable sense of how thoroughly it had been levelled by the time anyone thought to look for it.



