Ringfort (Rath), Caherass, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Caherass, Co. Limerick

What survives here is an ancient enclosure that spent a good part of the nineteenth century disguised as a fashionable garden feature.

The ringfort at Caherass, Co. Limerick, sits in pasture on a gentle south-east-facing slope, close enough to the entrance avenue of Caherass Court that the estate's influence on the site is hard to miss. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six inches to the mile in 1840, the circular earthwork was recorded not as an antiquity but simply as a copse of trees, a ring of planting that would have read as ornamental landscaping to any passing eye. Ringforts, also known as raths, are enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as defended homesteads by farming families across Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Here, whoever managed the Caherass demesne appears to have quietly absorbed the ancient enclosure into the designed landscape, planting trees within its interior and allowing it to function as a tree-ring rather than acknowledging it as a structure of historical significance.

By the time the larger-scale twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1897, the site was legible as a circular area with an external diameter of around forty metres, defined by a fosse, which is simply the ditch encircling the bank, and by a post-1700 field boundary running from the south-west around to the east-south-east. An estate access road intersected the enclosure at the south-east. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the site in 2001, surveyors recorded a raised roughly circular area with an internal diameter of thirty-seven metres north to south and thirty-five metres east to west. The earthen bank measured six metres wide, with an entrance gap of four and a half metres at the south-east, which aligns with the old access route shown on the Victorian map. The interior undulates and slopes slightly towards the south-east. A second ringfort lies sixty-five metres to the north-west, and Caherass Church stands around two hundred metres to the south, suggesting a concentration of early medieval and later activity in this relatively compact area of the Maigue valley.

The site sits roughly two hundred and ten metres north of the River Maigue and the townland boundary with Ballynahown, immediately north-west of the entrance avenue to Caherass Court. The mature trees planted within the enclosure, now well established, make the site partially visible through aerial imagery; it appears clearly on Google Earth orthoimages from June 2018 and February 2020. On the ground, the bank and entrance gap at the south-east are the details most worth locating, as they preserve the clearest sense of the original structure beneath its later demesne dressing.

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