Ringfort (Rath), Coolmore, Co. Tipperary

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Coolmore, Co. Tipperary

On the grounds of Coolmore House in County Tipperary, a thousand-year-old earthwork has been quietly repurposed as a garden feature.

A ringfort, or rath, the kind of circular enclosure that once served as a defended farmstead for an early medieval Irish family, now has gravel walkways, ornamental steps, and a small decorative bridge woven into its ancient fabric. A storage building sits at the centre of the interior. It is an odd collision of the prehistoric and the domestic, and one that is more common in Ireland than many people realise.

The earthwork itself measures roughly 38 metres east to west and sits on a gentle south-facing slope within the undulating terrain of the Coolmore House estate, with a golf course pressing up against it to the south. The enclosing bank, the raised circular ridge that would originally have defined the settlement boundary, has been largely worn down to a scarp, measuring about 2.6 metres wide with an interior height of just 0.15 metres, though on the exterior it still rises to 1.9 metres. Beyond the bank runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, here between 3.4 metres wide and up to 2 metres deep. Steps have been built up against the bank in the eastern and south-western quadrants, a gravel walkway laid into the fosse along the south-eastern side, and the ornamental bridge added against the bank at the south-south-east. The result is a monument that has been thoroughly domesticated, its defensive geometry now serving as the bones of a landscaped garden.

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