Ringfort (Rath), Knocknagroagh, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knocknagroagh, Co. Clare

Beneath a canopy of trees in the Ballyvaughan valley, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly swallowed by vegetation.

What was recorded on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a recognisable feature had acquired an additional curiosity by the 1916 edition, which marked a cave within its interior. That cave is almost certainly a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of early medieval construction, typically used for storage or refuge, and its presence here turns what might otherwise seem a routine field monument into something considerably more layered.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly between 500 and 1000 AD. This particular example measures an estimated forty metres in diameter. Its eastern side retains a substantial bank of earth and stone, five metres wide and standing some 2.4 metres on the exterior face, with traces of stone facing still visible. The south-southwestern and southwestern sections are far lower, little more than a gentle rise. Much of the rest is inaccessible under heavy overgrowth. There is a possible entrance on the east-southeastern side, about two metres wide, and on its western edge stands a holed orthostat, an upright stone with a perforation through it, measuring 1.4 metres long and 0.7 metres high. The function of such holed stones in ringfort entrances is not fully understood, though they may have served a structural or symbolic role. Writing in 1901, the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp described the site simply as a small levelled fort with a souterrain, a summary that has proved durable if not especially illuminating.

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