Ringfort (Rath), Meldrum, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A low rise in a Tipperary pasture at Meldrum holds a ringfort that has been slowly absorbed into the working landscape around it, its earthen bank doing double duty as a field boundary along its south-western to north-western arc.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically circular areas defined by one or more earthen banks with an external ditch, or fosse, designed to keep livestock in and opportunistic raiders out. What makes this one quietly interesting is the way centuries of agricultural activity have left their marks directly on the monument itself.
The fort measures roughly 39 metres east to west and 38 metres north to south, a fairly standard domestic scale. Its enclosing bank survives to an external height of just over two metres in places, though the interior face is considerably lower at around 0.45 metres, and the top of the bank narrows to about 1.4 metres across. The remains of a fosse, the ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank, are still visible from the south-west round to the east-south-east, with a basal width of three metres and an overall spread of nearly 7.65 metres, though much of its original depth has silted away to just 0.2 metres. The bank has been nudged slightly outward at the south-south-east, a distortion caused by a former field boundary that once ran across that section. An original entrance gap, about 3.5 metres wide at the base and seven metres across overall, sits at the north-north-west. A later breach in the bank at the south-south-west has been fitted with a farm gate, and a trackway runs immediately to the south, suggesting the fort has been folded into everyday agricultural use for some considerable time. The interior rises slightly at its centre, a subtle but characteristic feature of many surviving raths.