Ringfort (Rath), Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

What survives of this ringfort in Tullaroan is, by the time anyone thought to record it properly, almost nothing.

A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, once sat on a south-west-facing slope here, commanding open views across the landscape to the south and south-west. By 1987, when the site was formally inspected, land reclamation works had levelled it. What remained were faint traces: a low outer bank, around three metres wide and just thirty centimetres high, and a possible outer fosse, a defensive ditch, visible in the eastern sector at roughly two metres across.

The site has a longer documented life than its current state suggests. The first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, published in 1839, shows a lime kiln and a quarry sitting directly against the northern edge of the ringfort, industries that would have done nothing to help preserve it. By the time the map was revised in 1900, the quarry had disappeared from the record, and the monument itself was shown as a hachured circular enclosure with an overall diameter of roughly fifty metres north to south and forty-eight metres east to west. The scholar O'Kelly, writing in 1969, described it as a double rath, implying it once had two concentric banks rather than one, which would have made it a more substantial structure than most examples of its type. Double raths are relatively uncommon and are sometimes associated with higher-status early medieval settlement.

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