Ringfort (Rath), Coolearagh, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Coolearagh, Co. Kildare

Somewhere in the fairways of Woodlands Golf Course in County Kildare, a roughly circular earthwork sits in quiet competition with the surrounding landscape, its Iron Age origins now largely absorbed into the groomed terrain of a modern leisure facility. The monument is a rath, a type of ringfort that would once have enclosed a farmstead, its earthen bank and ditch forming a boundary of both practical and social significance for whoever lived within. What makes this one particularly curious is less what remains than how thoroughly the golf course has worked around and arguably into it, a low berm running along its north-east to south-east edge that appears to be a deliberate landscaping feature rather than anything prehistoric.

The rath itself is not in good condition. A slightly raised, sub-circular interior measuring roughly 23.7 metres east to west and 21.5 metres north to south is defined partly by a broad, low earthen bank, which stands no more than 0.2 metres above the interior on its southern side but rises to 1.6 metres on the upslope northern face, where it is heavily overgrown with thorn bushes. Elsewhere the boundary survives only as a low scarp, with faint traces of a shallow outer fosse, the ditch that once reinforced the bank's defensive profile. That fosse, just 0.3 metres deep and 1.5 metres wide, now carries plastic land-drainage pipe, a quietly deflating detail. An entrance was recorded at the north-west in 1972, but no trace of it remains visible today. The monument sits near the top of a gentle south-west-facing slope, with a broad stretch of bog lying approximately 100 metres to the west, a view that would have looked much the same to its original inhabitants.

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Pete F
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