Ringfort (Rath), Croom, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Somewhere along Church Road on the outskirts of Croom, a suburban house sits on ground that was once an early medieval ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure of a kind built across Ireland during the first millennium AD as a defended farmstead or settlement.
The fort is gone entirely, bulldozed in 1972 and 1973 to make way for residential development. What survives is paperwork, a few metal finds, and the peculiar footnote that, before the bulldozers moved in, the line of the ditch could still be traced across the levelled ground by a dense growth of thistles, the disturbed soil apparently providing exactly the conditions they favoured.
The ringfort had been recorded by the Office of Public Works as recently as 1957, when inspectors noted a raised circular interior of roughly 18.2 metres in diameter, defined by a low bank and an external fosse, that is, a defensive ditch, still clearly visible on the north-east side. When demolition of the site became imminent in the early 1970s, development was temporarily halted to allow archaeologist Elizabeth Shee Twohig to excavate before the ground was built on. Her work, published in 1977, revealed that the bank and ditch had originally formed a single-phase defensive circuit, with U-shaped ditch profiles reaching about 1.6 metres below the original ground level. The bulldozing had already disturbed the central stratigraphy to a depth of 30 to 40 centimetres, and a layer of humus and yellow clay spread during the construction of the adjacent house in 1973 had blanketed much of what remained. Despite this, Shee Twohig recovered postholes, pits, and a quantity of animal bone, along with a small group of finds including a bronze penannular ring, an iron knife with traces of a riveted bone handle, an iron loop, and a lump of iron slag. The fort had not stood alone: a second ringfort lay just 30 metres to the west, and another survives approximately 100 metres to the north.
There is nothing to see at the site today. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly as a small embanked enclosure; the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition captures it as a U-shape, already clipped on the south by the Croom to Rathkeale road. Satellite imagery from 2009 onwards shows only the roof of the house built over it. For anyone interested in how archaeological sites are lost, and occasionally salvaged in part, the Shee Twohig excavation report remains the most complete record of what was here, retrieved under difficult conditions from ground that had already been fundamentally altered.