Ringfort (Rath), Leamaneh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Leamaneh, Co. Clare

On the highest ground in the Leamaneh valley, a low earthen ring sits on a knoll with the land falling away on all sides, particularly to the east and west where the valley floor drops away.

It is the kind of site that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance; the bank is barely half a metre high in places, and what was once a drystone wall built along its northern arc has largely collapsed and been removed, leaving only a ghost of stonework in the grass. A later field wall cuts across the interior from north to south, complicating the picture further, and it takes a moment to disentangle the different phases of use that have accumulated quietly on this knoll over the centuries.

A rath, in Irish archaeological usage, is an earthen ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming. This particular example measures just under thirty-two metres across at its widest point, with an interior space of around twenty-six metres. It was already noted on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1840 and again in 1916, and the antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1913, described it as a levelled ring-wall near the avenue, suggesting it was already much reduced in his time. The site was later classified as a cashel in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996; a cashel, by contrast, is a stone-built ringfort, and the presence of drystone walling built onto the bank here may explain the ambiguity. A separate cashel stands about eighty-seven metres to the north-east, raising the possibility that this knoll and its immediate surroundings once formed a more substantial cluster of early activity than what survives today.

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