Ringfort (Rath), Knockroe, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
On a ridge crest in County Tipperary, a monument that once enclosed a defined domestic or agricultural space has been almost entirely absorbed back into the farmland around it.
No earthwork is visible above ground today, and the eastern boundary that once formed part of the structure was long ago converted into an ordinary field boundary. What survives of this rath, a ringfort of the type built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards as an enclosed farmstead, is essentially a ghost traced in the landscape by a slight kink in a hedgerow.
The site first appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1840 as a roughly hexagonal shape, its eastern side already folded into a field boundary. By the time the 1907 edition was surveyed, it was recorded as having a diameter of approximately 38 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west, with a bank still discernible in the northern and western sectors and a scarp visible to the south. An inspection carried out in February 1958 found the monument in considerably worse condition. Office of Public Works correspondence from that time describes only the south-western quadrant as surviving, with the fosse, the external ditch typical of ringfort construction, measuring around 1.8 metres wide on the western side and dropping roughly 1.2 metres below the interior platform. The interior itself was level, scrub had grown around the fosse, and the rest of the field was under tillage. The inspector noted, with some caution, that it was just possibly an old garden plot rather than a ringfort at all. The monument was excluded from the Land Project scheme then under way, a government-backed programme of agricultural improvement that cleared and levelled considerable amounts of marginal and semi-improved land, though by that point the damage was already largely done.
For anyone passing through this part of Tipperary, there is little to reward a deliberate search. The real interest is cartographic and documentary: the gap between what the 1840 map recorded and what remained by 1958 is a compressed history of how quickly field monuments can disappear when farming pressure is applied over a few generations.
