Ringfort (Rath), Mondellihy, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Two ringforts sitting side by side in a Limerick field is not, in itself, unusual; Ireland has tens of thousands of these early medieval enclosures.
What makes the pair at Mondellihy quietly interesting is that they were once described as a conjoined system, a north-and-south arrangement where one ring was stone-faced and capped with dry-stone walling, suggesting a more deliberate construction than the simple earthen banks that define so many of their kind. That distinctive stonework is now largely gone, and what survives of the southern fort is a faint circular platform, roughly 24 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, its defining bank worn down to a low scarp no more than 0.4 metres high and 1.8 metres wide. A ramp of about 4 metres cuts across the scarp at the south, possibly the ghost of an original entrance.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and recorded these features in the early twentieth century, publishing his description in 1921 under the name "Mondellihy Rings." Westropp was a prolific documenter of Irish earthworks and tower houses, and his notes on this site capture a moment when rather more of the structure was legible. He observed the two rings lying north and south of one another, one retaining its stone facing. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen or stone banks, typically dating from the early medieval period and understood to have served as a farmstead or defended homestead. The southern example here sits just 8 metres north of the townland boundary with Gortaganniff, with its companion fort, recorded separately under the reference LI021-011002, immediately to its north.
The site sits in pasture on a slight east-facing slope, with moderate views in most directions. It is not a monument that announces itself; by 2018, aerial imagery showed it as a poorly preserved feature, easily overlooked from ground level. Anyone seeking it out should expect to work with a map reference rather than a visible landmark, and should be prepared for the fact that much of what Westropp saw has since been levelled, particularly along the northern and eastern arc of the bank. The value here is less in what stands than in the pairing itself, two enclosures placed in deliberate proximity, one of which once carried dressed stonework that set it apart from the ordinary run of earthen raths in the surrounding landscape.