Ringfort (Rath), Camlin, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A field in Co. Tipperary that looks, to the casual eye, like little more than a slightly raised patch of pasture turns out to conceal one of the more layered early medieval sites in the county.
The circular outline of the rath at Camlin, roughly 36 metres across, survives as a low earthwork rising just over half a metre above the surrounding ground, with a shallow outer fosse, a ditch-like channel, still faintly visible to the south. Centuries of ploughing have done their damage, and the site as a whole has been largely levelled, but what lies beneath the soil is considerably more complicated than the surface suggests.
Archaeological investigation revealed that the eastern side of the interior holds a Christian-style cemetery, with a minimum of twenty to forty burials, adults and juveniles alike, laid out in the early medieval manner, aligned east to west with heads to the west. The graves date broadly to the 5th to 7th centuries AD, and the variety of burial practices within them is striking: one individual had stone supports placed around the head, another was interred in a slightly flexed position with the knees propped by rocks, and at least one grave may contain two individuals or, alternatively, the remains of a single person buried in a tightly crouched position, possibly an ossuary pit. No formal grave goods were found with any of the burials. To the west of the interior, evidence of a structure with a large hearth was uncovered, along with an iron knife, a copper alloy stick pin, and a flat disc-like metal ornament. These finds were unstratified, meaning their precise relationship to the site's phases cannot be fixed with certainty. The bank and ditch that defined the rath appear to represent a second, later phase of activity, probably between the 7th and 10th centuries, with the earthwork actually constructed over some of the earlier graves. The bank itself was built with a timber framework of wattle or palisade fencing on each face, held by lines of stakeholes, with a core of mud brick or clunch, a clay and stone composite material. A small bowl furnace was found set into the collapsed bank on the southern side, suggesting metalworking activity during this later period.
What makes the sequence at Camlin particularly interesting is the way it compresses two distinct periods of use into the same ground: a burial ground predating the fortification, and then a defended enclosure built directly on top of it. The 1835 Ordnance Survey depicted the site as D-shaped, while the 1904 edition shows it as circular, a discrepancy that reflects either the physical degradation of the earthwork over those decades or differences in how surveyors interpreted the eroded remains. The plough furrows that cut across the interior today continue a process of erasure that, it seems, began not long after the site was first abandoned.



