Ringfort (Rath), Boherroe, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Boherroe, Co. Limerick

A ringfort that no longer exists above ground is, in its own way, a more unsettling kind of monument than one still standing.

The site in Boherroe, County Limerick, known locally as Caherconreefy, survives only in maps, field notes, and the faint geometry of a working farm. A ringfort, to give the briefest context, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead and domestic enclosure. Thousands of them survive across the Irish countryside. This one does not.

The record of Caherconreefy's existence is actually quite detailed, which makes its disappearance all the more legible. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as a circular enclosure with a laneway leading eastward to a farmyard. By the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, it appears as a roughly circular platform measuring approximately 41 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west, already bisected by a farm trackway running east to west. When the antiquarian O'Dwyer described it in 1959 to 1960, the bank was still almost continuous, standing around 1.2 metres high and enclosing a platform roughly 38 metres in diameter, with a ditch nearly 3.5 metres wide. The western section of the ditch was missing even then. O'Dwyer prepared a profile drawing of the earthwork at that time, which remains one of the few records of what the site actually looked like. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland returned in 2008, they found no surface remains at all. Local information gathered during that survey indicated the ringfort had been levelled approximately forty years earlier, placing its destruction somewhere around the late 1960s or early 1970s. Satellite and aerial imagery taken between 2005 and 2018 confirms there is nothing left to see.

The site sits on a gentle east-facing slope in improved pasture, roughly 135 metres northwest of the townland boundary with Ballynagally. A farm trackway still runs east to west across the area where the monument once stood, with pasture to the north and a farmyard to the south. Visiting with any expectation of visible archaeology would lead to disappointment; the interest here is of a different kind, in reading a landscape that has been deliberately smoothed and in tracing, through maps and survey records, what the ground once held.

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