Ringfort (Rath), Borrismore, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Borrismore, Co. Kilkenny

In the farmed landscape of County Kilkenny, a low hillock carries a fort that locals once called Raavloughlan's fort, a name recorded as recently as 1905 and old enough to suggest a memory of a person or a clan long since dissolved into the land.

What makes the site quietly compelling is not its size but its layered construction: a roughly circular raised platform, some 35 metres at its longest, enclosed not by one bank but by two, with a fosse, a flat-bottomed defensive ditch, cut between them. An entrance gap survives at the south-east, and a causeway still crosses the fosse there, preserving the original approach just as it was designed to be used.

Ringforts of this kind, enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, are common across Ireland, but this one has a feature that lifts it out of the ordinary. Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted the fort's underground chambers, and a souterrain does indeed survive in the western quadrant of the interior. A souterrain is an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber, usually built from stone, associated with storage, refuge, or ventilation in early medieval settlements. Their presence in a ringfort often indicates a site of some substance and long use. The outer bank and fosse are well preserved at the east and south, though a farm track has destroyed both features across the northern and western sectors, a reminder that working landscapes and ancient ones have always competed for the same ground. The interior bank stands roughly 1.5 metres above the interior surface and 2.5 metres above the exterior, giving the platform a genuinely elevated feel despite the modesty of the surrounding terrain, and commanding clear views in every direction across the tillage and pasture that now surrounds it.

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