Ringfort (Rath), Barloughra, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Barloughra, Co. Clare

What makes the ringfort at Barloughra quietly odd is not its age or its design, both of which are fairly typical of early medieval Irish settlement, but the circumstances of its survival.

The monument now serves as a lawn. Deciduous trees ring the earthen bank, and a house with a patio sits close enough to the north-western arc that the bank has been noticeably flattened on that side, worn wider and lower by proximity to domestic life. A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a farmstead, and tens of thousands of them once existed across the country. That this one survives at all, mown and tended rather than ploughed out, is its own kind of peculiarity.

The enclosure sits at the northern end of a plateau in County Clare, with land dropping away to the north-east and rising again to the south. Its interior measures roughly 26.5 metres east-west and 22.6 metres north to south, with a maximum overall diameter of around 44 metres including the bank and outer fosse, the flat-bottomed ditch that originally ran around the outside of the bank. That fosse survives well along the southern to north-north-eastern arc, where it retains a base width of around 1.1 metres and an external depth of between 0.4 and 0.6 metres. Elsewhere it has been substantially reduced; along the north-eastern to south-eastern stretch it has been worn to a shallow lip barely five centimetres high, and along part of the southern side a laneway running inside the boundary wall has replaced it entirely. A break in the bank and fosse at the south-west may suggest that this section was deliberately drained at some point, though when or why is not recorded. The original entrance into the enclosure, a gap 1.4 metres wide, faces south-east, as is common with ringforts across Ireland, though additional gaps at the west and south have been introduced at later dates. The monument has been under a preservation order since 1976.

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