Ringfort (Rath), Curragharneen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Curragharneen, Co. Tipperary

On an east-facing slope in the uplands of County Tipperary, a roughly circular platform of raised ground sits quietly in the landscape, its original entrance long since lost to time or later disturbance.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch thrown up around a farmstead or small settlement, probably between the sixth and tenth centuries. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is not dramatic visual spectacle but the clarity with which its basic form has survived.

The enclosure measures approximately 38 metres across its northeast to southwest axis, a modest but respectable size. It is defined by an earth and stone bank roughly two metres wide, which still stands about one and a half metres above the external ground level, though only half a metre above the interior platform. Outside the bank runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, here about three and a half metres wide and a metre deep. These proportions are consistent with a single-enclosure rath of middling status, the kind that would once have sheltered a farming household and its outbuildings. A field fence cuts across the eastern side, which is likely why no entrance gap is now legible in the earthwork; the original causeway across the fosse, if it survived at all, has been obscured or removed by later agricultural boundaries.

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Pete F
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