Ringfort (Rath), Kilteely, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilteely, Co. Limerick

What appears from a distance to be a slightly raised hummock in an ordinary Limerick pasture turns out, on closer inspection, to be the surviving earthworks of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosure, usually circular and defined by one or more banks and ditches, that served as a farmstead and enclosure for livestock across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

This particular example sits in flat ground about 550 metres east of the summit of Kilteely Hill, which reaches an ordinary but respectable 580 feet above sea level, and about 100 metres south of the townland boundary with Ballyvouden. A second enclosure lies roughly 160 metres to the west, suggesting this part of the landscape once carried more structured settlement than its current agricultural plainness might suggest.

The site appears on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map, recorded there as a raised, roughly circular area with dimensions of around 27 metres northwest to southeast and 23 metres northeast to southwest, with a well noted immediately to its northeast. By the time the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 2007, the monument had contracted somewhat in measurable terms, or perhaps the earlier figure reflected the full spread of associated features. The survey described a roughly circular area of around 18 metres in diameter, enclosed by a low earthen bank, between 5 and 5.35 metres wide and only 0.2 metres high internally, rising to around 0.35 metres on the exterior. An outer fosse, the shallow ditch that typically runs around such enclosures, survives at roughly four metres wide and 0.35 metres deep. A gap of nearly six metres on the western side may be a modern intrusion rather than an original entrance. A linear bank intersects the monument from the west, running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, and a raised area visible off-centre in the northwest quadrant of the interior has been noted as potentially significant archaeologically, though it has not been formally investigated.

The site is in flat pasture and most easily appreciated from aerial imagery, where it reads clearly on both the Ordnance Survey orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012 and on Google Earth images from November 2018. At ground level, the earthworks are subtle; the bank barely clears the surrounding field surface, and without prior knowledge of what to look for, it is easy to walk past without registering anything unusual. The slight internal rise in the northwest quadrant is perhaps the most intriguing feature to seek out on the ground, sitting quietly off-centre within an enclosure that has, against considerable odds, retained its basic form across many centuries of agricultural use.

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