Ringfort (Rath), Mulgeeth, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Ringforts
A small rise of pasture land jutting westward into the Bog of Allen seems an unremarkable enough feature of the Kildare midlands, yet on its gentle slope sits what appears to be the ghostly outline of an early medieval farmstead, barely legible in the ground but present nonetheless. The site at Mulgeeth belongs to the category of monument known as a rath, the Irish term for the earthen ringfort that served as an enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands once dotted the Irish landscape; many have been ploughed away or built over, and others, like this one, have faded to the point of near-invisibility.
What remains here is a circular enclosure with an internal diameter of roughly 22.5 metres, defined by two concentric earthen banks and a shallow ditch, or fosse, between them. The inner bank barely rises above the surrounding ground, standing no more than 0.3 metres on its interior face, though it reaches closer to 1.7 metres on the exterior at the south-west, suggesting the ground has settled and eroded unevenly over the centuries. The outer bank, visible only to the east, is similarly faint. The fosse between them varies considerably in width, from about 2.3 metres on the east side to nearly 5.8 metres at the south. Curiously, the site did not appear on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1838, which may indicate it was already so degraded by that point that surveyors either missed it or judged it too indistinct to record. By 2005, aerial photography showed it as an overgrown area, its circular form more readable from above than from ground level. A possible habitation site lies roughly 250 metres to the north-east, hinting that this small spur of land may once have supported a modest cluster of early activity, now absorbed almost entirely back into the bog-edge pasture.