Ringfort (Rath), Creeves (Connello Lower By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A ringfort in County Limerick carries a woman's name, and nobody is entirely sure why.
Local tradition, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the Doon to Kilbreedy area, holds that the fort takes its name from a Lady named Anne, who supposedly had a stone wall built around it. That is the entirety of what survives about her. No surname, no date, no further context. The name stuck, and the earthwork remains in a field in Creeves, in the old barony of Connello Lower, quietly accumulating vegetation.
The fort itself is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically used as a defended farmstead sometime between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one is a circular area about thirty-one metres in diameter, enclosed by an earth-and-stone bank. The bank is modest on the interior side, rising only about seventy centimetres above the enclosed ground, but its external face is considerably more imposing, reaching around two and a half metres at its highest point on the western side, where the ground falls away most steeply. Traces of stone facing survive along the base of that outer face, suggesting the bank was once reinforced with dressed or laid stonework, which may be the construction Lady Anne's tradition preserves, however imperfectly. The entrance, nearly five metres wide, faces northeast, which is a reasonably common orientation for raths across the country. Cattle grazing has worn the bank down at the southeastern arc.
The fort sits in open pasture, straddling the western end of a low rise in gently undulating farmland, which means it is working agricultural land and any visit should be approached with that in mind. The interior is level but heavily overgrown with vegetation, making it difficult to read clearly from within. The external bank, especially on the western side, gives the better impression of the original scale. There is nothing especially dramatic to announce the place from a distance; it sits low in the landscape, the kind of feature that rewards patience and a willingness to read the ground carefully rather than wait for it to announce itself.