Ringfort (Rath), Freaghduff, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
Sitting in level pasture in County Tipperary, this circular earthwork at Freaghduff has been quietly absorbing the landscape around it for over a thousand years, and the landscape has been quietly absorbing it back.
A stoned farm trackway cuts across the outer ditch to the west, and possibly to the north as well, and topsoil has accumulated in the southern section of the same ditch. What was once a clearly bounded enclosure is gradually being folded into the working farmland that surrounds it.
The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank and ditch serving as much to define social status and mark territory as to provide any serious military defence. The Freaghduff example is modest in scale: the circular interior measures 32 metres in diameter, defined by a bank that rises to about 2.1 metres on its outer face. Outside the bank runs a fosse, a cut ditch roughly a metre deep and nearly seven metres wide at its broadest, and beyond that there is what appears to be a further, slighter outer bank, visible across the northeastern to southern arc. This outer bank has at some point been incorporated into a field boundary, as the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it. The western entrance, just over five metres wide, may be original, though it appears to have been widened at some stage, probably to accommodate farm traffic. The interior itself remains level, undisturbed by any obvious later use.