Ringfort (Rath), Dromlara, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
Locals around Dromlara in County Limerick know this modest earthwork by an unusually plain name: the 'round O'.
It sits in gently rolling improved pasture, barely distinguishable from the surrounding farmland at first glance, yet it has been quietly persisting in the landscape since early medieval times. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and defended homestead during the early Christian period in Ireland. Thousands survive across the country, though many, like this one, have been so reduced by centuries of agriculture that only careful measurement reveals what remains.
When field surveyors Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly from the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited on 15 January 2008, they recorded a raised circular area measuring 19 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west. The defining bank, around two metres wide and just 0.3 metres high, survives best along the northern, eastern, and southern arc. The western and north-western portions have been largely levelled, with only faint traces of a shallower bank, 1.2 metres wide and 0.18 metres high, still detectable underfoot. The site had already been noted on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, where it appears as a roughly circular earthwork. A second enclosure lies around 115 metres to the north-west, hinting that the wider area may have once supported more than one settlement of this kind. The monument sits approximately 28 metres west of the townland boundary with Brackyle.
On the ground, the 'round O' is unassuming enough that a visitor could walk past it without recognising what it is. The interior is level and grass-covered, with no obvious surface features to draw the eye. Aerial imagery is more revealing: cropmarks visible on both the Ordnance Survey Ireland orthoimagery from 2005 to 2012 and a Google Earth image from June 2018 trace the circular outline with surprising clarity, the differential growth of grass and crops betraying the buried bank beneath. If you have access to aerial or satellite imagery before visiting, it is worth studying it first; the 'round O' makes considerably more sense from above than it does standing in a field beside it.