Ringfort (Rath), Glenbane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A low rise in a Tipperary pasture, easy to dismiss as a trick of the ground, turns out to be the remains of an early medieval rath, a type of enclosed farmstead once so common across Ireland that several thousand survive in various states of preservation.
This one at Glenbane sits on a gentle elevation in rolling grassland, and its survival is partial and uneven in ways that are quietly instructive about how these monuments erode and disappear over centuries of agricultural use.
The earthwork is roughly circular, measuring about 22 metres in diameter. Its most coherent section runs from southwest to northeast, where an earthen scarp still rises to nearly three metres and is fronted by a broad, flat-bottomed fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the whole perimeter. In this better-preserved arc, the fosse retains a consistent profile, roughly five and a half metres wide overall, with a flat base about three and a half metres across. The opposite arc, running from northeast to southwest, tells a different story: the scarp has been levelled, the interior graded flat, and the fosse reduced to almost nothing, barely legible at ground level. The original entrance has been lost entirely. Along the surviving scarp, a course of drystone walling still sits on top, only about a tenth of a metre high, though whether this belongs to the original construction or to some later addition is unclear. Mature thorn bushes have taken hold along this section, a pattern common on undisturbed earthworks, where the thorns tend to colonise and, in doing so, inadvertently protect what lies beneath.
One detail sits slightly apart from the rest. Just inside the drystone footings at the north-northwest, there is a shallow circular depression about six metres across and barely ten centimetres deep. It has the look of a feature that was dug or formed relatively recently rather than in the early medieval period, though its exact origin is not known. It is the kind of anomaly that a careful eye will notice and that resists easy explanation.