Ringfort (Rath), Cooltomin, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
At Cooltomin in County Limerick, a roughly circular earthwork sits at the southern end of a low limestone ridge, doing a reasonable impression of an ordinary field boundary.
That is part of what makes it easy to miss. The enclosure, a rath or ringfort of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead, has been so thoroughly absorbed by its agricultural surroundings that the bank enclosing it, standing less than a metre high externally, is constructed in much the same style as the field walls that press up against it on three sides. Without knowing what to look for, a passing glance would register nothing more than another corner of a Limerick pasture.
The site was recorded on the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an embanked circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately forty metres, which gives some sense of the original scale. A ringfort of that size would have enclosed a substantial domestic area, likely the home and working space of a farming family during the early medieval centuries, protected by the surrounding bank and possibly a ditch, though no ditch is noted here. By the time the monument was surveyed for the national record, compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011, dense overgrowth had largely obscured the interior. What could still be traced was an earth-and-stone bank, and, according to local information, a scarped edge inside that defines the circular area, a cut or shaped slope in the ground that would have helped demarcate the enclosed space. At some point a field boundary that once abutted the enclosure at its southeastern side was removed, leaving the ringfort occupying the northwest corner of a large pasture field. Along the eastern face of the bank, field clearance boulders have been dumped, further blurring the outline of what was once a deliberately constructed form.
Access to the area is through working farmland, so permission from the landowner should be sought before approaching the site. The enclosure sits within a grazed field, and the ground around the southern end of the limestone ridge can be uneven. The overgrowth covering much of the interior makes close inspection difficult, but the curve of the bank is still legible from the field margin if you trace it carefully, particularly at the northwest and southwest, where surviving sections have not been obscured by dumped stone. The similarity between the ringfort's bank and the surrounding field walls is worth pausing over: centuries of agricultural activity have quietly remade this early medieval structure into something that looks, at first, like just another boundary.