Ringfort (Rath), Boolaglass, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Somewhere in the pastureland of Boolaglass, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across sits atop a low rise in limestone country, so thoroughly swallowed by bushes and trees that most people walking the surrounding fields would pass it without a second glance.
That near-invisibility is itself a kind of record: the site was clearly legible enough to be mapped in 1841, and whatever exposed it then has since been reclaimed entirely by vegetation.
A rath, to use the Irish term, is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when they served as the dwelling places of farming families across Ireland. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1841 shows this one as a neat embanked circular enclosure, the standard form. What survives on the ground today, as recorded by Denis Power, is considerably less legible. A short stretch of earth-and-stone bank remains accessible on the northern to north-eastern arc, with an internal height of around 0.6 metres and an external height of 0.45 metres. More interesting, perhaps, is a D-shaped annex projecting from the north-east, measuring roughly six metres north to south and three and a half metres east to west. This small attached enclosure is bounded by its own curved earth-and-stone bank and defined on its eastern side by a later linear field wall, suggesting the landscape has been reorganised around the monument at some point without entirely erasing it.
Access to the site is through open pasture, and the limestone outcrops that characterise the area make for uneven going underfoot. The northern and north-eastern portion of the bank is the section most worth seeking out, as it remains the most legible part of the structure. The interior of both the main enclosure and the annex is covered in dense overgrowth, so there is little to see once inside, and the vegetation makes the full circuit of the bank difficult to trace. Late winter or early spring, before growth thickens further, would give the clearest sense of the underlying earthwork. The annex in particular, with its mix of original banking and reused field wall, repays close attention for anyone interested in how ancient boundaries get absorbed into, and occasionally preserved by, the working landscape around them.