Ringfort (Rath), Derrygrath, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
Three ringforts occupy the same Tipperary hillside within 85 metres of one another, and this one sits at the southern end of the cluster, just below the crest of a south-facing slope in rolling pasture.
That proximity is the first thing worth pausing over. Ringforts, the circular enclosed settlements that were built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward, are common enough on their own, but finding three grouped so closely together suggests something more deliberate about how this particular patch of land was once organised and occupied.
The fort itself is roughly circular, measuring approximately 32 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, though those figures come from nineteenth-century six-inch maps rather than direct measurement; dense scrub and nettles now fill the interior and make surveying on the ground impractical. The enclosing bank is earthen and stone, and while modest in most sectors, it becomes noticeably more substantial along the western side, where it reaches two metres in external height and seven metres across at the base. A fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanied such banks as an additional defensive or boundary feature, runs along the southern arc from west round to the south-east, with a faint suggestion of a counterscarp bank beyond it. Gaps in the bank to the west, north-east, and east appear to be the work of cattle rather than original design. More intriguingly, a possible original entrance survives in the north-north-west sector, and it faces directly toward the adjacent ringfort 44 metres to the north, hinting at a functional or social relationship between the two enclosures.
The site is well covered by whitethorn along the bank and thick scrub throughout the interior, which makes a close inspection difficult and the dimensions of certain features hard to gauge with any confidence. The western bank sector, being the most pronounced, offers the clearest sense of the original scale of the earthwork, and the fosse on the southern side, though overgrown, is wide and deep enough to read in the landscape once you know where to look.