Ringfort (Rath), Bowling Green, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Bowling Green, Co. Tipperary

On the edge of Thurles, squeezed between a football pitch and a town water tower, there is a ringfort that has been gradually losing the argument with its surroundings for some time.

The western side is heavily overgrown, the north-western sector serves as an informal dumping ground, and the north-eastern arc has been cut away entirely, leaving the circuit impossible to trace. What remains is a circular enclosure roughly 46 metres across, its defining bank worn down to little more than a scarp about two metres high. It is, in short, a monument that the town has been quietly absorbing for decades.

Ringforts, also known as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were once among the most common features of the Irish landscape, with tens of thousands recorded across the country, though many have been lost to agriculture and development. This particular example sits on a gentle east-facing slope in the area known as Bowling Green, on the outskirts of Thurles. In 2001, archaeological monitoring carried out by Anne-Marie Lennon ahead of a nearby development found no archaeological features in the monitored area, though the exercise did at least confirm that the site was being watched, however fitfully, as the town continued to grow around it.

The site is not signposted or presented to visitors in any formal way, and given the degree of disturbance to the north and west, the overall form of the rath is easier to understand from a map than from standing within it. The football pitches to the east and the water tower to the north-east provide useful orientation, but the monument itself demands a certain patience and a willingness to read a landscape that has been significantly rearranged.

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Pete F
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