Ringfort (Rath), Kilrodane, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilrodane, Co. Limerick

What looks like a slight thickening in the hedgerow of a Limerick pasture turns out, on closer inspection, to be something considerably older.

At Kilrodane, a ringfort sits quietly in working farmland on a south-east-facing slope, its circular outline almost absorbed into the field boundary system around it. Ringforts, also known as raths, are enclosed farmsteads dating broadly from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, built to protect a family, their livestock, and their status. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying degrees of legibility, but this one is notable for the way the landscape has grown into and around it, making the archaeology and the agriculture almost impossible to separate.

The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011. It consists of a roughly circular area, measuring 26.5 metres north to south and 25.6 metres east to west, enclosed by two concentric earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The inner bank stands just over a metre high on its exterior face, though it sits lower along the eastern arc where it has been incorporated into a field boundary running from south-south-west to north-north-west. The fosse between the banks is 1.4 metres wide and is deepest along the same south-south-west to north-north-west stretch, though dense overgrowth now covers much of it in that section. The outer bank, lower at around 0.95 metres internally and only 0.3 metres on its exterior, is partially overlain by the same field boundary to the south-south-west. An entrance gap, 2.7 metres wide, cuts through both banks at the east-south-east. The interior slopes gently downward toward the centre and remains under pasture.

Because the site sits within active farmland, access would require landowner permission. The two-bank, single-fosse arrangement makes it a bivallate rath, a form generally associated with households of slightly higher social standing than those who built the more common single-banked enclosures. The easiest way to read the form is to walk the perimeter where the banks are clearest, between north-north-west and south-south-west, before the field boundaries take over and the earthworks blur. The entrance at the east-south-east is the single most legible feature. Autumn and winter, when vegetation dies back, offer the best chance of seeing the fosse before the overgrowth reasserts itself.

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