Ringfort (Rath), Scartnadrinymountain, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Ringforts
On a south-west-facing slope at the western foothills of the Monavullagh Mountains in County Waterford, a grass-covered circle roughly thirty-four metres across sits quietly inside a coniferous forest, left unplanted while the trees press in around it. That deliberate gap is one of the small peculiarities of this ringfort, or rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when such enclosures served as the defended homesteads of farming families rather than military fortifications in any formal sense.
The enclosing bank here is composed of earth and stone, between three and four metres wide, and its height varies considerably depending on which side you measure from. On the upslope eastern side, the external face rises to 2.2 metres, while on the downslope western side it barely clears 0.2 metres internally, the natural gradient doing much of the work the bank cannot. An external fosse, a defensive ditch running from north-north-east to south-east, survives with a depth of 1.2 metres and a top width of 3.7 metres. The bank on the north-west and north-north-east has been absorbed into a later stone field wall, and while a modern entrance 2.1 metres wide passes through that wall to the north, the original entrance has not been identified. In the interior, there is evidence of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber that in early medieval contexts typically served for storage or concealment. Another rath lies roughly thirty metres to the north, suggesting this was once part of a broader settled landscape. Extending eastward from the outer bank is a relict field bank, only faintly preserved, which curves southward in an arc about thirty metres long before being cut by a later field boundary and drain, a ghostly outline of an earlier agricultural arrangement.