Ringfort (Rath), Baysrath, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ringforts
Inside a cereal-drying kiln on the south-western edge of an early medieval ringfort in County Kilkenny, archaeologists found a human skeleton.
That detail alone gives Baysrath a particular quality of strangeness. The kiln, dumb-bell shaped and used for drying grain, was not a burial structure, yet its northern terminus contained one individual, and disarticulated remains from a second person were recovered from elsewhere within it. How they came to be there is not recorded in any surviving explanation.
The ringfort, a circular enclosure roughly 30 to 33 metres in internal diameter, sat on a south-facing slope in what is now pasture. A ringfort of this type, sometimes called a rath, is a farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch rather than a defensive wall in any military sense. Here the ditch, known as a fosse, averaged about 3.25 metres wide and 1.4 metres deep with a U-shaped profile, and several fills within it suggested the original bank once stood on the interior edge. An entrance faced east. The site was excavated between 2006 and 2007 ahead of road improvement works on the N9 and N10, and the exercise revealed that the ringfort had been built over an even earlier palisade enclosure, a fence-line of upright timber posts marking a predecessor settlement beneath. Radiocarbon dating of animal bone from the base of the ditch places the ringfort's use somewhere between roughly AD 720 and 892. That makes it slightly later than a linear cemetery lying about 140 metres to the north, where the most recent burial dates to between around AD 566 and 645. The whole cluster of monuments, spread across approximately 1.8 hectares, spans from the Late Neolithic to the early medieval period, suggesting this low slope was returned to repeatedly across several thousand years.
What emerged most clearly from the excavation was not just the ringfort in isolation but the organised landscape around it. Three groups of small circular structures defined by ring-slots, the foundation trenches left by curved timber or wattle walls, sat outside the enclosure and appear to be contemporary with it. A field system radiates outward from the ringfort, its boundaries partially reflected in field boundaries still visible today. A gap in one of those ancient boundaries, roughly 19 metres to the east, lines up precisely with the eastern entrance to the ringfort, a quiet piece of alignment connecting a working early medieval farmstead to the fields its inhabitants cultivated.