Ringfort (Rath), Ballyvaghan, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
Beneath the modern development of Ballyvaghan village in County Clare, an early medieval farmstead is quietly disappearing into the undergrowth.
A rath, which is the Irish term for a ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure that served as a defended homestead during the early medieval period, survives here in a state of considerable neglect, hemmed in on all sides by the buildings of the contemporary village. What was once a commanding position, elevated enough to afford wide views eastward over the turlough, a seasonally flooding limestone lake characteristic of the Burren landscape, has become a small overgrown island in an ordinary streetscape.
The earthwork itself is subcircular, measuring roughly 30 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west internally, and is defined by a bank ranging between two and six metres wide. A fosse, or external ditch, runs around most of the perimeter from the east-south-east to the west-north-west, still reaching depths of over a metre in places. The interior is flat and currently featureless to the eye, though that plainness says nothing about what might survive beneath the surface. The rath appears on both the 1840 and 1916 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, marked with hachuring, the cartographic convention used to indicate earthen banks and mounds. By 1996, the formal record was classifying it more cautiously as an "Enclosure". A modern wall has been built directly along the northern bank, tracing the ancient line of the earthwork without acknowledging it. A second rath survives approximately 130 metres to the south, suggesting this corner of the village was once a settled agricultural landscape of some density.