Ringfort (Rath), Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

Most ringforts in the Irish landscape are solitary enclosures, the remains of early medieval farmsteads defined by a single earthen bank and ditch.

What sits in the wet pasture of Boherygeela, in County Limerick, is something more complicated: two large earthwork enclosures joined together, stretching some 145 metres along a northeast-to-southwest axis, and possibly connected in antiquity not just to domestic life but to public assembly. That second possibility is what sets this place apart.

The antiquarian T.J. Westropp visited and described the site in detail in 1920, recording a western platform roughly 58 metres across north to south and 70 metres east to west, terraced above the surrounding low field and bearing a now-levelled parapet on which hawthorns had taken root. He noted the eastern enclosure as still more irregular, with a wet fosse, an outer mound to the north some 2.7 to 3.6 metres thick, and a well-preserved northern cusp rising to about 2.1 metres. Writing in 1919, Westropp had also floated the suggestion that this monument may have been one of the assembly places in County Limerick, sites where communities gathered for legal, political, or ceremonial purposes under the old Gaelic order. By 1944, O'Kelly described the two enclosures as bounded only by fosses, varying between 4.5 and 9 metres wide and roughly 1.5 metres deep, with no surviving trace of any original banks. The 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map annotated it simply as an "Entrenchment," which tells you something about how such monuments were understood at the time. Several other earthworks sit nearby, including a ringfort to the southwest recorded as Lisduffnacrean, and a further enclosure 70 metres to the northeast.

The site lies in low, wet pasture on the road between Rathmore and Caherguillamore, roughly 40 metres north of the townland boundary with Crean. It is agricultural land, and the earthworks have not escaped later interference; post-1700 field boundaries cut across the southeast of the site, and probable drainage works are visible to the north and southwest in aerial imagery. The monument is most legible from the air, its D-shaped outline and the trace of a partially tree-lined bank showing clearly on orthophotographs. Ground level offers a subtler reading: the raised platforms, the hawthorn-crowded edges, the distant views of Knockfirina, Tory Hill and the Galtee Mountains that Westropp remarked upon, despite the seemingly unremarkable setting.

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