Ringfort (Rath), Knockanes, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A ringfort absorbed so thoroughly into a working farmyard that concrete walls now form part of its boundary is not as uncommon in Ireland as one might hope, but the example at Knockanes in County Limerick makes the point with unusual clarity.
The earthwork sits on level ground immediately south of a modern garden and farmyard, its ancient perimeter interrupted on the north and west by a poured concrete yard wall, on the northeast by a concrete garden wall, and on the south and east by wire fencing. The result is an enclosure that has been quietly colonised by centuries of practical agriculture without ever quite disappearing.
Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks, and were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads, their banks offering a degree of protection for livestock and household. The Knockanes example sits precisely on the boundary between the townlands of Killeen and Ballygeale, with a related enclosure recorded some 580 metres to the southwest. It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a small circular field of around thirty metres in diameter, at that point adjoining the southeast side of a historic farmstead. By the time of the 1897 twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey edition, it is recorded more explicitly as a circular embanked enclosure, measuring approximately thirty-four metres north to south and twenty-nine metres east to west, with its northwest quadrant now adjoining the farmstead. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the site in 2001, the interior was level and dry, though densely overgrown towards the south, and the enclosing earth and stone bank measured around 4.3 metres wide with an external height of just over a metre. No fosse, the external ditch that often accompanies such banks, was visible.
The site is not formally open to the public and sits within an active farmyard setting, so access would require the landowner's permission. On recent Google Earth imagery from 2018 and 2020, it reads clearly as a circular tree-covered rise, the vegetation having done more to preserve its outline than the surrounding infrastructure might suggest. Visitors interested in the broader landscape should note the related enclosure to the southwest, which gives some sense of how densely this part of Limerick was once settled at the domestic scale.