Ringfort (Rath), Flemingstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Flemingstown, Co. Tipperary

A field boundary cuts straight through the middle of this ringfort in County Tipperary, bisecting an earthwork that was already old before anyone thought to run a fence across it.

That alone gives the site an odd, layered quality; not destroyed exactly, but quietly overwritten by later agricultural logic, as though each era simply worked around what it found and left its own mark on top.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, most commonly built during the early medieval period in Ireland as a farmstead or place of shelter. This example, set on a south-east-facing slope in rough pasture, is a bivallate form, meaning it has two concentric rings of bank and ditch rather than one. The inner bank is broad at the base and reaches nearly a metre in height on the interior side; beyond it lies a flat-bottomed fosse, then a second outer bank with a steep external profile, and a narrower ditch beyond that. The whole enclosed space measures roughly twenty-four metres across. What makes the site particularly interesting is the question of what happened to it after its original use. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1840 recorded it not as a fort but as an oval tree-ring, suggesting it had at some point been planted with trees, a common fate for old earthworks that farmers found inconvenient to plough but useful as windbreaks or boundary markers. By the time the second edition was surveyed in 1907, it was mapped again as a circular bivallate enclosure, though the large tree stumps that remain scattered across the banks and interior are a physical record of that intervening phase. The interior is slightly concave, as is typical of ringforts, and is now heavily overgrown with brambles.

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Pete F
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