Ringfort (Rath), Goat Island, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A raised circular platform sitting in ordinary farmland pasture in County Limerick carries a name that most maps have long since forgotten.
The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as Dunmorrisheen, marking a circular area enclosed by a bank, but the name has faded from common use even as the earthwork itself, worn and softened by centuries of grazing, continues to hold its shape in the field.
Ringforts, known also as raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a farmstead and its livestock. This particular example in the Goat Island townland sits roughly eighteen metres south of the boundary with Ballyvulane and twenty metres west of the boundary with Tankardstown, with traces of an associated field system immediately to its north. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded its dimensions in 1916 to 1917, describing a gently sloped mound between seven and nine feet high, forty-five feet across the top and eighty-six feet overall, ringed by a shallow fosse-like hollow some fifteen feet wide. A fosse is simply a ditch, often dug to provide the material for the bank thrown up beside it. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its twenty-five-inch map edition in 1897, the monument was already being read as a raised circular platform defined by a scarp rather than a clearly articulated bank, suggesting it was already losing definition even then.
The site is on private agricultural land, so access would require the landowner's permission before approaching. For those with an interest in aerial photography and satellite imagery, the outer fosse was still legible on a Google Earth image taken in March 2017, and the outline of the monument appeared in Ordnance Survey orthophotos captured between 2005 and 2012, which gives some sense of what survives at ground level. A visitor standing on or near the mound should look northward for the faint traces of the associated field system, which together with the rath itself suggests a small but coherent early medieval agricultural landscape, quietly preserved in a stretch of Limerick pasture that most people pass without a second glance.