Ringfort (Rath), Garrynagry, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Garrynagry, Co. Clare

On a drumlin top in Garrynagry, County Clare, a faint circular platform sits in the grass, barely announcing itself to anyone who does not already know to look.

It measures roughly twenty-five metres across, its perimeter defined by a low bank that rises no more than a few centimetres on the interior but lifts to nearly a metre and a half on the south-western exterior. There is no visible entrance, no surrounding ditch or fosse, and no obvious break in the earthwork. For most passers-by it would read simply as a slight unevenness in a field.

This is a rath, the commonest type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically built between around 500 and 1000 AD as a defended farmstead for a single family of some local standing. A bank and an outer ditch, or fosse, would usually have defined the boundary, with a timber palisade or hedge adding further height. Here the fosse has either been filled in over centuries of cultivation or was never dug to begin with, leaving only the bank, much reduced, to trace the circuit. The site sits on a drumlin, one of those smooth oval hills left behind by retreating glaciers, and that elevated position would have given its original occupants a clear view over the surrounding landscape. It was catalogued as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, classifications that reflect how worn and ambiguous the earthwork had become by the time it was formally assessed.

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Pete F
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