Ringfort (Rath), Cush, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A ringfort sitting in ordinary reclaimed pasture on the slopes of Slievereagh might not seem remarkable at first glance, but this one occupies ground that was identified by the antiquarian T.
J. Westropp, writing between 1917 and 1919, as the supposed site of Temaír Erann, the ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe. That association alone sets it apart from the thousands of similar earthworks scattered across the Irish countryside. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily during the early medieval period as a farmstead or residence. This example is bivallate, meaning it has two such concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, between them, and it sits at the centre of a wider archaeological complex that includes a second ringfort just 30 metres to the north and three burial mounds to the south-west.
The site was excavated in 1934 and 1935 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, who listed it as Ringfort No. 7 in what he called the Northern Group of forts at Cush. His published account from 1940 gives a precise and candid picture of what he found. The fort measured roughly 140 feet, or about 42.6 metres, in overall diameter, but the double-rampart system had already been compromised long before his arrival. The inner bank on the southern side had been absorbed into a field boundary, and on the northern side it had largely vanished, leaving only the faint slope of the fosse as evidence of its former line. The entrance had been on the western side. Inside, excavators found a low stone wall facing the inner bank on the west, standing less than two feet high, and beside it a considerable quantity of iron slag, suggesting some form of metalworking had taken place within the enclosure.
The fort lies within reclaimed agricultural land, and a post-1700 field boundary running east to west still cuts across its southern portion, a visible reminder of how routinely such monuments were reshaped by later farming. On aerial and satellite imagery the circular form remains legible, the two banks and intervening fosse readable as a ring roughly 24 metres across despite centuries of disturbance. The broader Cush complex rewards patient attention; the proximity of the burial mounds, the second ringfort to the north, and the remnants of a larger field system mean that what looks like a single earthwork in a field is, in fact, one component of a landscape that people organised and used, and buried their dead within, across a very long span of time.