Ringfort (Rath), Cloonloum More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloonloum More, Co. Clare

What makes this particular patch of County Clare countryside quietly arresting is not what you can see, but what you almost cannot.

A ringfort, or rath, the type of roughly circular earthen enclosure built across Ireland during the early medieval period as a farmstead and family compound, sits on a very gentle south-south-westward-facing slope in Cloonloum More, its double enclosing banks so low and so thoroughly swallowed by vegetation that the monument is effectively invisible from any distance. Briars and furze have formed what surveyors described as an impenetrable thicket over the enclosing elements, while the interior, measuring roughly 32 metres north to south and 33.5 metres east to west, is choked with rushes standing nearly a metre high. Three large rocks visible at the south-western edge may once have belonged to a field boundary rather than the fort itself, and there is no evident outer fosse, the ditch that often accompanies such structures.

What gives this site an added layer of interest is its position within a cluster of similar monuments. Two further ringforts lie close by, one approximately 45 metres to the south-west and another roughly 120 metres to the north-east, a proximity that hints at a landscape that was once considerably more organised and densely settled than the rough pasture visible today. A levelled enclosure immediately adjoins the site to the south-west, its original form now largely gone. The 25-inch Ordnance Survey map recorded the circular outline of the rath clearly enough, but on the ground the earthworks have retreated behind decades of unchecked growth, leaving a place that is present on maps and absent to the eye in almost equal measure.

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Pete F
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