Ringfort (Rath), Skehanagh (Connello Lower By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A ringfort that had effectively vanished from official maps by the late nineteenth century is not necessarily a ringfort that has vanished from the ground.
This one, sitting in flat pasture along the townland boundary between Skehanagh and Coolybrown in County Limerick, managed to survive in a reduced but legible form even as it was absorbed into working farmland. What makes it quietly interesting is that gap in the cartographic record: clearly enough defined to be drawn as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, it was then omitted entirely from the twenty-five-inch edition of 1897, suggesting that by the end of the nineteenth century it had been levelled sufficiently to escape the surveyors' notice, or simply their interest.
Ringforts, also called raths, are enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as protected homesteads rather than military fortifications. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected this example in 2007, what remained was a roughly circular area measuring approximately 20 metres north-east to south-west and 18 metres north-west to south-east. The enclosing bank had been reduced to a low scarp, just 0.4 metres high and about 4.5 metres wide, and the fosse, the ditch that would once have run outside it, survived as a shallow depression only 0.15 metres deep. A stream and a field boundary had cut across the northern and north-eastern sides, and overflow from that same stream had carved sinuous gullies around the monument's exterior. The interior has long since been levelled into the surrounding pasture. Aerial orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2013 also revealed a series of relic field enclosures abutting the south-south-east side of the ringfort, hinting at a small agricultural landscape that once clustered around the settlement. Notably, a second ringfort lies just 290 metres to the north-west.
Because the earthworks are so slight, this is a site best appreciated through aerial imagery rather than a ground visit alone. The monument is visible on Google Earth orthoimages from March and April of 2012 and 2015, where the faint circular trace and the associated field enclosures read more clearly from above than they do at eye level. On the ground, what a careful observer might notice is the slight change in the pasture's texture where the old scarp runs, and the irregular gullying along the outer edge caused by stream overflow. The townland boundary itself bisects the broader landscape here, making it worth cross-referencing the OSi six-inch map of 1840 to appreciate just how much of the original circuit was once considered worth recording.