Ringfort (Rath), Boherroe, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Boherroe, Co. Limerick

A low oval swell in a field of improved pasture in County Limerick is easy to walk past without a second thought.

The ground rises slightly, the grass is a little uneven, and the surrounding farmland gives no obvious clue that what lies underfoot is the ghost of an early medieval enclosure, a rath, that never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's historic maps. That absence alone is quietly telling. Countless ringforts across Ireland were recorded, named, and debated for generations; this one in Boherroe slipped through the documentary record almost entirely.

A ringfort, or rath, is simply a roughly circular enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. The Boherroe example sits on a gentle north-west-facing slope, about thirty metres west of the townland boundary with Ballytrasna. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined and measured it in 2008, surveyors Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly recorded an oval enclosure measuring roughly twenty metres east to west and seventeen metres north to south. The defining bank survives in better condition on the northern and eastern sides, where it still stands to an external height of around half a metre with a width of nearly six metres. To the north and west it has been reduced to a scarp, though one section there retains a height of one and a half metres. A fosse, the ditch that typically ran alongside the bank, is still visible on the north-eastern and south-eastern arcs, and there are indications of a possible outer bank at the north-east and south-east as well, hinting that the original enclosure may have been more elaborate than its present condition suggests.

The site is most legible not from ground level but from above. Aerial orthoimagery taken between 2005 and 2012 by the Ordnance Survey Ireland shows the monument as a roughly oval cropmark, and a Digital Globe image from 2011 to 2013 captures it similarly, but the clearest view comes from a Google Earth image taken on 28 June 2018, when crop or grass stress made the buried remains particularly sharp. For anyone visiting in person, the interior is grass covered and only slightly uneven, so it reads as little more than a gentle irregularity in the field. The townland boundary with Ballytrasna nearby offers a useful locating reference, and the north-western orientation of the slope means the light in the late afternoon can occasionally throw the low earthworks into mild relief, making the bank and scarp easier to read from a short distance.

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Pete F
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