Ringfort (Rath), Ballyhomuck, Co. Tipperary

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyhomuck, Co. Tipperary

Two ringforts sitting directly alongside one another is not something you encounter every day.

At Ballyhomuck in County Tipperary, a rath, which is an earthen ringfort of the kind built throughout Ireland from roughly the early medieval period, shares its western and north-western edges with a neighbouring example, the two enclosures effectively conjoined. This pairing gives the site an unusual character: where most ringforts stand as self-contained circular or near-circular enclosures defined by a bank and outer ditch, here two such monuments grew up side by side, their boundaries touching and, in places, overlapping.

The monument itself is sub-circular, measuring roughly 31 metres east to west and just over 36 metres north to south. Its earthen bank survives to a considerable size along the northern and eastern arcs, standing around two metres high internally and externally, and spreading to over eleven metres in overall width at its base. Accompanying this bank is a fosse, the external ditch that forms the other half of a ringfort's defensive or enclosing scheme, running along the same northern and eastern arc and measuring nearly eleven metres wide. The southern portion of the enclosure has fared less well. A later field boundary and drain cut across the southern arc, reducing the bank there to little more than a low scarp. Between the two conjoined ringforts to the west, another such boundary acts as the dividing line, and the fosse in that area has been partially backfilled. The interior slopes steeply downward in keeping with the south-facing hillside on which the whole monument sits, and it is now planted with beech and conifer trees, which both obscure and, in a way, preserve the underlying earthworks from further agricultural disturbance.

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