Ringfort (Rath), Rine, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
What looks at first glance like a slightly uneven patch of good Clare meadowland is, on closer inspection, the flattened remains of an early medieval ringfort, its circular outline still readable as a low scarped platform sitting on a gentle westward slope, roughly a hundred metres from the shore of Lough Murree.
The earthwork has been worn down considerably over the centuries, its defining bank now no more than a scarp between 0.6 and 1.3 metres high, and a later field wall has been built directly over its eastern side, as though the builders simply found a convenient ridge and followed it. The interior measures just under twenty metres across in either direction, a modest enclosed space of the kind that would once have sheltered a farming household and their animals behind a more substantial bank.
What makes this particular rath quietly interesting is what lies beneath it. In its north-western sector there is a two-chambered souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind that early medieval Irish communities built beneath or beside their ringforts, most likely for food storage or as a place of concealment in uncertain times. The souterrain here has its own separate record, and its presence is hinted at above ground by stones that project outward from the north scarp, almost certainly the exposed edges of its structure. The rath itself was catalogued simply as an enclosure when it was formally listed in 1996, a cautious classification that reflects how much of its original form has been lost to time, agriculture, and the opportunistic reuse of its fabric for later boundary walls.