Ringfort (Rath), Moymore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
The enclosing bank of this small ringfort in Moymore, County Clare, is doing its best to disappear.
On its south-south-east to west-north-west arc, the earthen and stone bank has worn down to little more than a five-centimetre rise on the interior side, barely enough to cast a shadow in low winter light. The north-west to east section fares considerably better, standing at around sixty-five centimetres internally and spreading six metres across at its base. That unevenness is part of what makes the site worth attention: it offers an unusually clear illustration of how these structures decay at different rates depending on exposure, land use, and the gradual accumulation of cleared field stones heaped against them by successive generations of farmers.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed primarily from earthen banks, were the most common form of enclosed rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, dating broadly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They typically housed a single farming family, with the enclosing bank serving as a boundary and a modest defence against livestock raids rather than military assault. The Moymore example is roughly oval, measuring around twenty-seven metres north-north-east to south-south-west and thirty metres west-north-west to east-south-east. Thorn trees, which in Irish tradition were often left uncut out of a sense that they marked places with an otherworldly character, grow along the bank and around the interior perimeter. Inside, bare rock outcrops through the surface in places, and loose field clearance stones lie scattered across the gently sloping ground, which tilts slightly downhill to the north-east. One telling detail: all the field boundaries that appeared on the 1921 Ordnance Survey six-inch map surrounding this spot have since been removed, leaving the ringfort sitting in an open, undifferentiated pasture that bears little resemblance to its recorded nineteenth and early twentieth century context.