Ringfort (Rath), Garryrickin, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Garryrickin, Co. Kilkenny

In the west quadrant of this quietly substantial ringfort, a long shallow depression runs east to west across the interior.

It is about eleven metres long and roughly a metre deep, and it marks the roof of something that no longer holds its shape: a collapsed souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly built within Irish ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or the cool keeping of dairy produce. According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, this one had two stone-roofed chambers. They are gone now, caved in, leaving only the ground's quiet subsidence as evidence.

Carrigan described the site as a partially dismantled rath, which is the Irish term for a ringfort of earthen construction, typically dating from the early medieval period. The monument sits on level ground within a triangular pasture field known locally as Bawnacrusha, a name that itself carries a trace of older usage. The enclosure is defined by a bank some five metres wide and standing about one and a half metres above the exterior, along with an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, roughly seven metres wide. A possible ramped entrance survives at the south-southwest, about three and a half metres across. The bank is degraded toward the north-east but otherwise the circuit remains legible. Carrigan, who was otherwise reliable on Kilkenny monuments, mistakenly placed the site in the adjacent townland of Butlerswood rather than Garryrickin, a small but telling reminder of how local knowledge can slip even in careful scholarship. The interior diameter measures thirty-three metres, making it a reasonably sized example of its type, and the ground falls gently away to the east, south, and west while rising slightly to the north, giving the position an open aspect across a broad plain on either side.

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