Ringfort (Rath), Garraun, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
At the base of a west-facing hill in upland Tipperary, on poorly drained reclaimed grassland beside a small east-west stream, a low circular earthwork sits quietly in a field whose old boundaries have long since been erased.
What remains is a slightly raised platform, roughly thirty metres across, enclosed by an earth and stone bank. At its fullest, along the eastern quadrant, the bank still reads as a genuine enclosure; elsewhere it has been worn down to a scarp barely half a metre high. An outer fosse, a defensive ditch, runs around the outside, best preserved from the east through to the south-west, and is several metres wide at its base.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when earthen rather than stone-built, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries. They were not forts in any military sense but enclosed homesteads, the bank and fosse serving to keep livestock in and wolves or rivals out. The Garraun example is modest in scale but contains a detail that lifts it slightly out of the ordinary: within the south-east quadrant of the interior, what appear to be the wall-footings of a rectangular house can be made out, running toward and seemingly off the edge of the scarp. Rectangular domestic structures are less commonly recorded inside ringforts than one might expect, and their presence can sometimes suggest a later phase of occupation, when building fashions had shifted away from the circular forms more typical of the early medieval period. Whether these footings represent that kind of reuse, or something else entirely, is not recorded.
The field boundaries shown on the Ordnance Survey six-inch edition of 1953 to 1954, to the north and south of the ringfort, have since been removed, which has altered the immediate landscape context considerably. The ringfort sits in open ground, with good views north and west, and higher ground rising to the east.