Ringfort (Rath), St. Johnstown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ringforts
A ringfort that was partly dismantled to build farm roads is an unusual fate even by the standards of Ireland's thousands of surviving raths, and this one in St. Johnstown, County Tipperary carries the marks of that intervention plainly.
Around 1975, according to researcher Cahill writing in 1982, the interior of the site and the inner face of its earthen bank were stripped for road-making material. The work exposed the core of the bank and revealed it to be largely composed of shale chips, which is itself a detail worth pausing on: most ringfort banks are built from the upcast of the surrounding ditch, so a shale-chip core suggests deliberate sourcing of material, perhaps from the slope the fort occupies.
A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a farmstead. This example sits on an elevated east-facing slope in pasture, with the ground falling away to the north and south as well, giving it a naturally commanding position. The enclosure measures around 45 metres in diameter, defined by a bank and a fosse, the fosse being the external ditch that typically provided the material for raising the bank. That fosse survives, though not easily seen: the bank has been consumed by a dense ring of gorse that is spreading inward and is particularly thick in the south-south-east sector, burying both the fosse and a field boundary running east to west along the monument's southern edge. A large pond sitting slightly off-centre to the west, measuring roughly 16 metres by 14 metres, may be the depression left by the quarrying activity of the 1970s. A related enclosure lies approximately 150 metres to the west, suggesting this was once part of a broader settled landscape.
The monument is fenced off from the surrounding pasture and left ungrazed, which has allowed the gorse to thicken unchecked. Anyone approaching it should expect the earthwork itself to be largely invisible beneath vegetation, with the pond and the fenced perimeter offering the clearest physical sense of where the rath sits on the hillside.