Ringfort (Rath), Dooally, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
In a field of level pasture in Dooally, County Limerick, a near-perfect circle sits quietly in the landscape, its outline still sharp enough after perhaps a thousand or more years to be measured with some precision.
This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. Essentially a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, raths were built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and tens of thousands of them once dotted the countryside. Most have been ploughed away or built over; this one survives with its geometry more or less intact.
The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in August 2011, with aerial photographs taken in March 2006 providing additional documentation. The enclosure measures approximately 27.5 metres north to south and 26.9 metres east to west, making it a modest but reasonably well-preserved example of the type. What defines it on the ground is a scarped edge, meaning a deliberately cut and shaped bank, standing around 1.2 metres high and just over a metre wide. Outside that runs a fosse, the term for the accompanying ditch, which is 0.6 metres deep and 2.3 metres wide. A gap of about 2 metres in the scarped edge on the east-south-east side most likely marks the original entrance. A modern field boundary has been built along the outer line of the fosse as it runs from the south-west around to the north-north-west, which both preserves and partially obscures that portion of the monument.
The interior slopes gently downward toward the east and is dry underfoot, currently grazed as pasture. Because the site sits in working farmland, access would require the landowner's permission. The enclosure reads most clearly from a slight distance or from above, which is why the aerial photographs taken for the Archaeological Survey remain a useful reference. At ground level, the scarped edge and the line of the fosse are the features most worth tracing, particularly on the eastern arc where the entrance gap interrupts the bank and gives some sense of how the original occupants would have moved in and out of their enclosed world.