Ringfort (Rath), Coolacokery, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A field in Coolacokery, County Limerick, holds a circle of pale, stunted grass ringed by a band of nettles roughly two metres wide, and that is about all that remains visible of what was once a rath.
A rath is a type of ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure used in early medieval Ireland, typically by a farming family of some social standing, as a defended homestead. Most were built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, and thousands of them survive across the Irish countryside in varying states of preservation. This particular example is not one of the better-preserved ones.
The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1923 as a circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately twenty metres, which places it at the smaller end of the rath scale. By the time Denis Power compiled the field notes uploaded in August 2011, the earthworks had been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural activity in the intervening decades. What remained measurable was a roughly circular patch running about eighteen metres north to south, the ground vegetation still reacting to whatever lies beneath or once lay there, the nettles tracing the former bank with a fidelity that the plough could not quite erase. Nettles are often associated with disturbed or nutrient-rich ground, and their persistence here is itself a kind of unintentional record-keeping.
The site sits on a gentle slope facing north-northwest, within pasture land. There is nothing to announce it and no formal access or signage. The pale grass and the nettle band are most legible from a slight distance, particularly in dry summer conditions when differential growth between the circular patch and the surrounding pasture becomes more pronounced. Anyone seeking it out should cross-reference the 1923 OS six-inch mapping, now widely available through the historical map layers on geohive.ie or similar platforms, to locate the approximate position within the field. The landowner's permission would naturally be required. What you are looking for, in the end, is a circle of grass that grows a little differently from the grass around it, which is a quiet but not insignificant thing.