Ringfort (Rath), Ballycormick, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
There is a ringfort in Ballycormick, County Limerick, that does not appear on any Ordnance Survey map.
Not because it was missed, exactly, but because by the time anyone was looking closely enough to record it properly, the fort itself had already been ploughed almost entirely out of existence. What remains is less a structure than a faint argument in the soil, visible only under the right atmospheric conditions and best understood from several hundred metres above the ground.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a circular enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, built using earthen banks and ditches to define a farmstead or settlement. This one at Ballycormick appears to have been bivallate, meaning it once had two concentric banks with an intervening fosse, or ditch, between them, a configuration that generally suggests a site of some status or defensive concern. The enclosure measures approximately 40 metres in diameter. It sits around 15 metres south-west of a known ringfort already recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record, and about 15 metres west of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site associated with fire-heated water. That clustering of monuments is not unusual in the Irish landscape, but it does suggest the area was in use across a considerable stretch of time. The site was formally identified as Site 1B in a plan submitted by P.J. O'Hanlon of Teagasc in 2009, and it was compiled into the record by Martin Fitzpatrick, uploaded in July 2020. A Google Earth orthoimage from October 2010 showed the circular cropmark clearly; a later image from April 2020 captured a fainter version, by which point a farm road had been cut directly through the enclosure.
There is little to see on the ground in any conventional sense. The banks have been levelled and the fosse filled in, and a field boundary running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west bisects what remains. The site sits in pasture, and without the benefit of aerial imagery taken at the right time of year, when differential crop growth or soil moisture reveals the buried geometry beneath, the enclosure is essentially invisible at ground level. The value here is less in visiting than in understanding how much of the Irish archaeological record exists in this condition, present but imperceptible, detectable only through the patient cross-referencing of satellite images, soil surveys, and archive plans.