Ringfort (Rath), Kilbreedy, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
What is most quietly remarkable about this corner of Kilbreedy townland in County Limerick is not any single monument but the density of them.
The rath here sits in the south-west corner of a pasture field, and within a radius of roughly 180 metres there are at least two further enclosures of the same general type. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined by an earthen bank and ditch, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Finding one in a field is not unusual; finding three within a few hundred metres of each other in the same townland prompts the obvious question of who was farming here, and why so many felt the need to mark out their ground so emphatically.
The Ordnance Survey of 1840 recorded the broader situation with admirable economy, noting in its Name Books the presence of four ancient forts in the townland, one to the north and three clustered to the south-west. The monument itself was depicted on the 1840 six-inch map as a raised oval-shaped platform defined by a scarp, and by the time the more detailed 25-inch edition was produced in 1897, surveyors recorded a roughly circular area measuring approximately 39 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank and an external fosse. The fosse is a shallow ditch dug around the outside of the bank, the earth from which was used to raise the bank itself, and together they formed the principal boundary of the farmstead. That fosse is now largely invisible on the ground, though a faint cropmark, the kind of discolouration that appears in aerial imagery when buried features affect how grass or grain grows above them, was recorded on a Google Earth image taken in March 2016.
On the ground today the monument reads as a circular area enclosed by a tree-covered bank, with two gaps breaking the circuit: a wider one of around 17 metres on the eastern side and a narrower gap of roughly 5 metres to the west, both visible on aerial photography taken between 2005 and 2012. The site is in pasture and not formally opened to the public, so any visit would require landowner permission. The tree cover on the bank makes the circuit reasonably legible even in summer, though the cropmark of the fosse is the kind of detail best appreciated through the aerial imagery compiled by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland rather than on foot.