Ringfort (Rath), Ballynabanoge, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballynabanoge, Co. Limerick

There is a ringfort in Ballynabanoge, County Limerick, that you cannot easily see from the ground.

No earthen bank rises from the surrounding fields, no obvious ditch catches the eye, and there is nothing to mark the spot for a passing walker. What survives instead is a ghost of the original structure, readable only from above, where the buried remains of the enclosure's ditches and banks alter the way crops grow, producing a faint but legible oval stain on the surface of the earth.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath when it is earthen rather than stone-built, is a roughly circular enclosure that served as a farmstead, typically during the early medieval period in Ireland. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, though many, like this one, have been substantially reduced over centuries of agriculture. The revised 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map already recorded the enclosure as modified, suggesting that by the late nineteenth century the original form had been considerably altered. The monument measures roughly 50 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 40 metres on the north-east to south-west, making it a mid-sized example of a suboval plan. Its survival as a cropmark has been documented across multiple surveys: aerial photographs taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in March 2006, Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophotos from 2005 to 2012, Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image captured in June 2018. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in October 2020.

Because the monument survives primarily as a cropmark rather than as upstanding earthworks, a visit in summer, when cereal crops are maturing, offers the best chance of making out the oval outline in the field. The site lies approximately 180 metres to the south-west of the reference point noted in the survey record. There is nothing to excavate or climb, but standing at the field edge on a clear day and comparing what you see with the aerial photographs available through the national monuments viewer gives a real sense of how much archaeology lies just beneath ordinary farmland in this part of Limerick.

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