Ringfort (Rath), Lough, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lough, Co. Kilkenny

A low earthen platform sitting on the crest of a narrow ridge in County Kilkenny does not announce itself in any obvious way.

There are no surviving banks, no visible entrance, and none of the dramatic ditchwork that makes some ringforts immediately legible in the landscape. What remains is an ovoid raised platform, roughly 33 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, its western edge still standing two to three metres above the surrounding ground. The views from here are wide and unobstructed in every direction, out over lower-lying grassland, which hints at why someone chose this precise spot in the first place.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, and this one carries a name that sets it slightly apart. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan recorded it as Raithín na mBodach, rendered in his text as Raheennamuddach, meaning the little Rath of the Churls. The word "churl" in early Irish social terminology referred to a person of low or unfree status, which gives the place a quietly loaded identity. Whether that name preserves some genuine memory of the people who once occupied the enclosure, or is simply an old piece of local colour, is impossible to say at this distance. Carrigan also noted, in the matter-of-fact manner typical of nineteenth-century local historians, that a man named Bowe was living there at the time of his writing.

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