Ringfort (Rath), Lisfunshion, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A small earthwork in a Tipperary field, barely knee-height in places, turns out to be a surprisingly well-preserved example of a bivallate ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that was built in its thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.
What makes the example at Lisfunshion quietly compelling is not grandeur but detail: two concentric earthen banks, each with its own fosse, or defensive ditch, wrapped around a roughly circular interior just over twenty-one metres across. Most ringforts that survive in the Irish landscape have been reduced to a single bank and ditch at best; the presence here of a second, outer circuit, however eroded, suggests a little more deliberate effort went into its original construction.
The site sits on a gentle north-facing slope in undulating pastureland, with a stream running east to west about twenty metres to the north. The inner bank measures nearly four metres across at its base and stands about a metre above the surrounding ground on its outer face. The flat-bottomed fosse between the two banks is four metres wide and drops to a depth of over a metre, dimensions that would have made casual entry considerably less straightforward than the present, heavily overgrown state implies. A second, shallower fosse, surviving only in the north-east quadrant, adds another layer of enclosure. Both banks have a noticeably steep profile, which is consistent with deliberate shaping rather than simple mounding. A six-metre break in the outer bank on the southern side may mark a former entrance, though there is no corresponding visible gap through the inner bank, so the original access route remains unclear. A narrow field drain has since been cut along the outer face of the eastern bank, and cattle have widened a gap in the north-west quadrant to about one and a half metres, the ordinary pressures of agricultural land doing what centuries could not quite manage on their own.