Ringfort (Rath), Ballymackea More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballymackea More, Co. Clare

A low grassy bank in a field in County Clare is easy to walk past without a second thought, yet the circular earthwork at Ballymackea More is old enough that no one alive has any memory of what it was built for.

It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that appears across Ireland in enormous numbers, most of them dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were typically used as farmsteads, the enclosing bank offering a degree of protection for a family and their livestock. What makes this one quietly interesting is how much of its original form survives beneath the turf, and how little of it announces itself.

The fort sits on the southern side of a gentle east-west ridge, towards its eastern end, a position that would have offered modest elevation and drainage. The interior is roughly circular, measuring approximately 22 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south. The defining feature is an earthen bank, still grass-covered, which varies considerably around its circuit: on the eastern side it measures about 5.4 metres wide, while on the southern side it broadens to around 10 metres. The interior height of the bank is modest throughout, between 0.3 and 0.45 metres, though the exterior face stands somewhat higher, up to 1.1 metres on the east. There is no visible fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies such banks, and no identifiable entrance gap has survived. Whether the fosse was never dug here, or has simply silted and grassed over across the centuries, the record does not say. Classified as an enclosure in both the Sites and Monuments Record and the Record of Monuments and Places during the 1990s, it occupies a category broad enough to acknowledge uncertainty about its precise function or date.

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