Ringfort (Rath), Ballygowney, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ringforts
On a west-facing valley slope in Ballygowney, County Kilkenny, a nearly complete ring of raised earth marks out a space that has been enclosed, in one form or another, for well over a thousand years.
The enclosure is modest in scale, roughly twenty-five metres across, but its form is legible enough: a low earthen bank, about three metres wide and rising a metre above the interior, paired with an external fosse, the term for the ditched depression dug to create the bank material in the first place. Together, bank and fosse define the classic profile of a rath, the most common type of Early Medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries.
What survives here is a fairly faithful outline, even if time and agriculture have taken their toll. The fosse, which runs around the outside of the bank at roughly four metres wide, becomes less distinct in the southern and western sectors, where the slope and soil conditions may have allowed it to silt and settle more readily. More visibly disruptive is a field boundary that cuts across the eastern quadrant on a northwest-to-southeast line, running along the perimeter and damaging both bank and fosse where it meets them. This is a familiar story with ringforts across Ireland: they survived millennia of use and abandonment, only to be partially undone by the practical geometry of later land division. The steep gradient of the hillside gives the site a slightly awkward orientation, the interior tilting westward down into the valley rather than sitting on level ground, which may say something about why this particular patch of slope was chosen, commanding a view of the valley below while remaining sheltered from the east.