Ringfort (Rath), Carrowduff, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Carrowduff, Co. Clare

A small earthwork in a marshy Clare field has been recorded on Ordnance Survey maps since 1840, marked with the hachured lines that cartographers used to indicate raised ground or earthen features.

It is still there, largely intact, though a local boreen has crept up against its southern side and a dry-stone wall now runs along the top of the bank for a stretch, blurring the boundary between ancient enclosure and modern field boundary.

The monument is a rath, a type of ringfort built during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used as a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks. This particular example is nearly circular, measuring 30.5 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west. Its bank is round-topped and earthen, standing between 0.35 and one metre above the interior and up to a metre above the exterior ground level. Around the eastern half of the monument, a dense band of vegetation hints at the likely presence of an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have been dug to throw up the bank material and to add a further layer of enclosure. Three gaps interrupt the bank: one recent break at the west-northwest, and two older ones at the north and east-southeast, the latter quite wide at 5.5 metres across. The interior, which slopes gently downward toward the north, is now thick with reeds, a consequence of its position on a north-facing slope in undulating, marshy pasture roughly fifty metres from the Ballydeely River. No internal features are visible above ground.

What is quietly telling about this site is how legibly it has survived despite being pressed on all sides by working farmland. The boreen wall that surmounts its southern bank is not vandalism so much as the ordinary accumulation of centuries of land use, each generation finding the old earthwork a convenient boundary to borrow from. The 1840 and 1916 maps both show it, which means it was already a recognised feature of the landscape long before anyone thought to formally protect it.

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Pete F
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