Ringfort (Rath), Newtown, Co. Limerick

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Newtown, Co. Limerick

A ringfort sits in the grounds of a GAA club just 130 metres from the M7 motorway, its earthen bank and surrounding fosse, or ditch, still largely intact beneath a canopy of trees and scrub.

The combination is quietly incongruous: a monument probably constructed somewhere between the early medieval period and the early centuries of the first millennium, ringed by the noise and infrastructure of a modern dual carriageway, with an access road to the club grounds running immediately to its east and north.

The site appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it was recorded under the name Lisheen Fort and described in the accompanying Name Books as a small circular fort of approximately 150 links, the equivalent of around 30 metres in diameter, and already partly defaced by cultivation. That 1840 entry, drawn from the records of Kilmurry Parish, placed the enclosure roughly 50 metres north of where it actually stands, a small cartographic error that hints at the challenges surveyors faced when mapping features already being absorbed into the agricultural landscape. By the time the more detailed 25-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1897, the southern and western sides of the monument had been incorporated into historic field boundaries, a process that continued with modern boundary lines. The earthwork as it survives today has an internal diameter of approximately 30 metres and an external diameter of around 46 metres, with an entrance gap on the south-south-east side.

The monument sits on level pasture within the Monaleen GAA Club at Peafield, in County Limerick. Because it lies within a functioning sports club, access is not simply a matter of walking across open land, and a visitor would need to be mindful of the club's activities before approaching. The ringfort is most easily identified from aerial imagery, where it reads clearly as a tree-covered circular earthwork; on the ground, the bank and fosse are overgrown and the outline is easier to appreciate from a slight distance than from within the scrub itself. The entrance gap at the south-south-east remains the most legible feature at ground level.

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Pete F
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