Ringfort (Rath), Curraghscarteen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
In the undulating farmland of Curraghscarteen in County Tipperary, a low earthen ring sits on the north-facing slope of a natural hillock, its outline still legible after more than a thousand years of cattle, weather, and quiet neglect.
What makes it worth a second glance is not grandeur but persistence: the outer bank still rises to over two metres on its exterior face in places, and the enclosing fosse, a shallow surrounding ditch, remains visible despite being partially filled in on the south-western and north-western sides.
This is a rath, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, a circular earthwork enclosure typically dating to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and understood to have served as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. The bank here is gravelly and earthen, approximately six metres wide, defining an interior roughly thirty-five metres across. That interior is not flat; it sits raised above the surrounding ground, a feature that would have made the enclosure more imposing from outside. The original entrance appears to have been a narrow gap on the south-south-eastern side, just under one and a half metres wide. A second opening on the western side is almost certainly a later cattle gap, punched through the bank at some point after the site ceased to function as a settlement and became simply another field. Inside the north-western quadrant, a linear quarry cutting roughly sixteen metres long runs north to south, suggesting that at some stage the interior was dug into, perhaps for gravel or building material. Scrub has taken hold around the edges and within the enclosure, and there is dead timber lying in the centre and against the outer face of the south-western bank.