That kind of detail, a living water source in close association with a ringfort, is easy to overlook when you are accounting for earthworks and measurements, yet it quietly suggests why this particular brow of land was chosen in the first place.

A ringfort, or rath, is the most common type of monument in the Irish countryside, a roughly circular enclosure defined by a bank and ditch that once surrounded a farmstead, probably occupied somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one in Tinnalintan sits on a gentle westward-facing slope in County Kilkenny, open to long views to the south-west, west, and north-west, though rising ground closes things off in other directions. The enclosure is sub-circular, with an internal diameter of around 31 metres north to south, and in its original form it would have been defined by an inner earth and stone bank, a fosse (that is, a ditch), and an outer bank beyond that. The inner bank, where it survives, still stands to about 1.7 metres on the interior face and 1.8 metres on the exterior, with an overall width of 6 metres. The south-eastern arc is the best preserved. Elsewhere, time and agriculture have done their work: the north-western quadrant is considerably denuded, a modern drainage channel has cut through the bank between the south-south-west and west, and along the northern side a later field bank has been laid directly over the line of the fosse, cannibalising the older monument for a newer boundary. The fosse itself has been infilled across much of its circuit and is only clearly visible where it runs from north-north-east through to south-south-west. Inside, the ground slopes from south-east to north-west and is now thickly overgrown with hawthorn, beech, and brambles, the kind of dense scrub that tends to accumulate wherever cultivation has been quietly abandoned.