Ringfort (Rath), Glenahilty, Co. Tipperary

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Glenahilty, Co. Tipperary

A concrete shed now sits in the southern sector of this early medieval enclosure in Glenahilty, which is perhaps the most succinct summary of what centuries of agricultural use can do to a monument.

The rath, a type of ringfort typically built as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, survives only in part, yet what remains tells a clear enough story about gradual erasure and the way field systems quietly consume the past.

The site appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1843 as a complete circular enclosure, already bisected by a field boundary running northwest to southeast. By the time the revised edition was produced in 1903, only the southwestern half of the enclosure was being depicted, reflecting what had by then been lost on the ground. The northeastern half has been levelled, though a curving rise to the east still traces the ghost of the original circuit. What survives of the southwestern arc is more substantial: a raised interior standing roughly 1.67 metres above the surrounding pasture, with a bank now worn down to a scarp, and a wide flat-bottomed fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have encircled the entire structure, measuring some 5.4 metres across and 0.85 metres deep, with a slight counterscarp, the low outer bank on the far side of the ditch, still detectable. The overall surviving dimensions of that southwestern half run approximately 42 metres northwest to southeast and 20 metres northeast to southwest to the field boundary.

The site sits on a gentle southeast-facing slope in open pastureland, and the surviving earthworks are readable once you know what you are looking at: a raised platform, a worn bank, a broad shallow ditch curving away into the field. The concrete shed in the southern sector is harder to look past, but it has not entirely obscured the underlying form.

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Pete F
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