Ringfort (Rath), Brodeen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
Beneath the pasture at Brodeen, according to a 1982 report, there is a souterrain.
Nobody has found it. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement, used for storage or as a refuge, and their presence beneath ringforts is not unusual. What is unusual here is that this one was noted and then promptly lost to knowledge, its location unverified and its entrance, if it still exists, swallowed somewhere within or beneath the earthwork above.
The ringfort itself is a rath, the term used for an earthen-banked enclosure of the kind built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward, most commonly as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. This particular example sits in level pasture and measures approximately 35 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west. Its bank, covered in whitethorn, rises to around 1.85 metres on the exterior and is still clearly defined, though the base has been worn away by water collecting in the surrounding fosse, the shallow ditch that runs around the outside of the bank. That fosse is about 5.5 metres wide and half a metre deep at present. A hedgerow field boundary cuts across the fosse to the north-northwest, and a drain runs away from it to the south-southeast, signs of the ordinary agricultural management that has shaped and reshaped the land around the monument over centuries. The causewayed entrance, a raised crossing through the fosse originally about four metres wide, sits at the east-northeast and has been widened at some point to allow vehicles through. The ringfort was documented on aerial photography as far back as July 1968.
The interior slopes gently downward toward the east and remains under pasture. Visitors approaching it will find a monument that has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape, its bank holding its shape well enough but its boundaries blurred by the field systems built up around it. The unreported souterrain, if it survives at all, lies somewhere underfoot, still unlocated.