Ringfort (Rath), Glencolumbkille, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Glencolumbkille, Co. Clare

Sitting on a gentle rise in what is now improved farmland, this large earthwork in Glencolumbkille, County Clare has been quietly accumulating centuries of modification while the surrounding landscape got on with being agricultural.

What makes it particularly interesting is not just its age but its double-bank construction: a bivallate rath, meaning a ringfort enclosed by two concentric earthen banks with a ditch between them, which represents a more substantial defensive or status-signalling effort than the single-bank raths that are far more common across Ireland.

The structure is considerable in scale, with an interior measuring roughly 55 metres east to west and 48 metres north to south, placing it in the larger end of the ringfort spectrum. The two banks are separated by a flat-bottomed fosse, the kind of ditch that would originally have formed a meaningful obstacle; at the south-south-east to south-south-west stretch, slippage from the inner bank has narrowed it considerably over time. Both banks were built from earth and gravel, but there are signs of more deliberate stonework: traces of a well-made stone inner-facing survive on the north side of the inner bank, and some stone outer-facing remains on the western side of the outer bank, though this second ring is generally in poorer condition. Several large boulders that are not set into the ground sit along the west-north-west arc of the inner bank. The entrance, about two metres wide in each bank, faces the west-south-west. The site was mapped on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet in 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1920, confirming its presence across nearly two centuries of cartographic record. Later field walls, including one that serves as a townland boundary, have been built into the banks or run along the outer edge, the kind of incremental land management that tends to blur the original outline of early medieval enclosures without quite erasing them.

The trees now growing across the banks partly obscure the full circuit, but the level grass interior and the entrance gap are still legible. The outer bank, though worn, can be traced, and the fosse between the two rings remains identifiable. The most intact stonework is on the northern and western sides of the inner bank, where the facing courses are best preserved.

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