Ringfort (Rath), Camas, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
On an elevated plateau in County Limerick, a ringfort has all but vanished into the grass.
What was once a clearly defined circular enclosure, roughly fifty metres across, now survives only as a faint depression running from the east-northeast to the south-southwest. To walk across it today is to cross what the OS surveyors of 1924 still recorded as a legible embanked ring, and to find almost nothing left.
Ringforts, known variously as raths or cashels depending on whether their enclosing banks were earthen or stone, were the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock within a circular earthen bank and ditch. This example at Camas was, by the time it appeared on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1924, still identifiable as an embanked circular enclosure. At some point after that survey, the monument was levelled. The surrounding field boundaries have also been removed, which suggests the land was consolidated or reorganised for agricultural use, a process that claimed a great many such sites across Limerick and the wider country during the twentieth century. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.
The site sits in pasture on a plateau that slopes gently down toward the southeast. There is no dramatic feature to announce it, and without foreknowledge a visitor would likely pass over it entirely. What remains is that slight ground depression, most readable in low-angle light, such as on an overcast morning or in the long shadows of late afternoon. Because the surrounding field boundaries have been cleared away, the immediate landscape offers few reference points, which makes it worth consulting the 1924 OS mapping beforehand to orient yourself to where the enclosure once sat. The location is worth knowing about precisely because so little is left; it is a useful, quietly sobering example of how thoroughly a substantial earthwork can be erased from the countryside within a generation or two of agricultural change.