Ringfort (Rath), Monaster North, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
What looks, at first glance, like a slightly raised oval of rough pasture on a south-facing slope above the Camoge River turns out to be one small piece of an extraordinarily dense ceremonial landscape.
The ringfort here in Monaster North sits within 520 metres of a pair of conjoined enclosures identified as the assembly place of Óenach Cairbre, and within 45 metres of a second, smaller enclosure. The Camoge itself doubles as a townland boundary, dividing Monaster North from Monaster South, and a ford close by carries the old name 'The Ford of the Chariots of Fergus', suggesting that the river crossing was already ancient when medieval records first noted it.
The antiquarian T.J. Westropp, writing in 1920, annotated this earthwork on his sketch plan of Monasteranenagh as a 'ring mound' and placed it within the wider territory of Óenach Cairbre. An óenach was a periodic assembly, something between a fair, a legal gathering, and a religious festival, and the Camoge valley appears to have hosted one of considerable importance. Westropp compared the whole complex to the great ceremonial landscapes of Tara, Brugh na Bóinne, and Rathcroghan, noting that such places typically combined an assembly site, a cemetery expressed as tumuli and ring mounds, an ancient roadway, and a water source. All of those elements are present here. Writing in 1906, Begley had tentatively identified the cluster of monuments near Monasteranenagh abbey as 'Oenach Beg', the lesser óenach that implied, by its name, the existence of a greater one. Power, in 1930, noted that the earthworks on the north bank of the Camoge, opposite the abbey, may have had connections with a great fair and its associated pagan rites. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland measured the monument in 2007, they recorded an oval earthwork roughly 30 metres by 26 metres, defined by a scarp and an external fosse, which is a shallow drainage or boundary ditch, with the scarp raised slightly on the south-east side to compensate for the natural fall of the hillslope.
The monument sits in improved pasture and is partially tree-covered, which makes its outline easier to read from aerial imagery than from ground level. The fosse is best preserved along the northern and eastern sides; overgrowth obscures the outer scarp to the north and east, and the fosse has been partially infilled on the western arc. Field clearance stones have been laid along the outer edge of the fosse to the north-north-east, a common fate for earthworks in working farmland. The 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map marks it clearly, and its oval outline remains visible on aerial orthoimages taken as recently as 2018, which gives a useful orientation before approaching on the ground.