Ringfort (Rath), Killeen, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Two things happened to this ringfort that, between them, nearly erased it entirely.
A road cut through its northwestern edge at some point before 1840, and a field boundary swallowed its southern perimeter sometime after 1700. What survives of the enclosure is now so thoroughly absorbed into the agricultural landscape of Killeen townland in County Limerick that its clearest outline is visible not to the naked eye but from satellite imagery, where a circular cropmark betrays the ghost of the original earthwork beneath a field of pasture.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead for a single family and their livestock. This particular example sits about 380 metres east of the Morningstar River, which marks the boundary between Killeen and the neighbouring townland of Ballingarry. The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a raised oval shape with a scarp and fosse, those outer ditches that once gave the enclosure its defensive profile, already clipped at the northwest by a north-south road. By the time the 25-inch map was produced in 1897, the monument had been reduced further, its scarp and fosse folded into the field system, the whole structure measuring roughly 45 metres northwest to southeast and 40 metres on the perpendicular axis. The Ordnance Survey field notes from 1840, covering the stretch from Abbeyfeale to Bruree, identified this as one of two small forts near the centre of the townland. The other was called Rahasteen; this one was called Killeen, and it carried a trigonometrical station, one of the surveying markers the Ordnance Survey erected across Ireland during its great nineteenth-century mapping project, placed in the northeast quadrant and recorded at 499 feet above ordnance datum.
On the ground today the monument is largely levelled, and the average visitor walking the field would find little to distinguish it from the surrounding pasture. The cropmark, that faint circular trace caused by differential growth in the vegetation above the filled-in fosse, shows up in Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, and remains the most legible record of the enclosure's shape. The old road noted in the 1840 survey still runs roughly north from the site, which may help orient anyone approaching across the fields. The monument is not formally marked or signposted, and access would depend on landowner permission.