Ringfort (Rath), Drumeevin, Co. Clare

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Ringfort (Rath), Drumeevin, Co. Clare

There is a field in Drumeevin, Co. Clare, where a ringfort once stood that is now effectively invisible at ground level, detectable only from the air and, even then, only for a narrow window of time.

A rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically consisted of a roughly circular earthen bank and external ditch enclosing a farmstead or settlement. At Drumeevin, the outline measured approximately 28 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south, a modest but not unusual size. What makes it quietly notable is the completeness of its disappearance.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 and 1916 both recorded the enclosure with hachuring, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork, and the 25-inch plan of 1897 showed an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running from the south-west to the north-west, along with a trackway that skirted the site and led to a farmhouse roughly 70 metres to the west. By the time anyone walked the field in May 1999, no surface trace remained. A bungalow had been built on the ground immediately to the west, and the surrounding pasture, hilly and poorly drained, offered no visible indication that anything had ever been there. Aerial imagery from 2005 recovered most of the outline, along with evidence of a later trackway cutting through the eastern and northern limits of the site. By 2011 to 2013, even that ghostly aerial trace had gone.

The site sits near the eastern end of a ridge running roughly east to west, with mature conifer plantations pressing in from the east and south. There is nothing to see on the ground now, which is itself a kind of record of how thoroughly modern activity, gradual drainage improvement, construction, and agricultural use, can erase a feature that survived in legible form for over a thousand years and was still being mapped with care well into the twentieth century.

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Pete F
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