Ringfort (Rath), Graigoor, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A ringfort that has been almost entirely erased from the landscape still holds its shape in the ground at Graigoor, in County Limerick, if only just.
These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead. At Graigoor, the bank survives as little more than a whisper in the pasture, but the enclosure it once defined remains legible to anyone willing to look carefully.
The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1923 as a clear circular enclosure, which gives some sense of how much has changed in the intervening decades. Since that survey, the monument has been levelled, the process of agricultural improvement that has claimed so many similar sites across the country having done its quiet work here too. Denis Power, who compiled the site record uploaded in August 2011, noted that the rath survives as a sub-circular area measuring roughly 26 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. A low earthen bank, standing to an internal height of around 0.3 metres and an external height of 0.15 metres, runs from the north-north-east around to the south-east, while the remainder of the circuit is defined by a scarped edge, just 0.1 metres high, continuing from the south-west around to the north-north-west. A field boundary that the 1923 map shows crossing the site along a north-south axis has since been removed.
The site sits in pasture on a gentle east-facing slope, with the interior of the enclosure dropping very slightly downhill toward the east. There are no facilities, signage, or formal access arrangements, and nothing marks the spot from a distance. What a visitor is really doing here is reading the ground itself, the slight rise and fall of grass that, once you know what you are looking for, resolves into the ghost of a circular boundary. The best conditions for spotting such subtle earthworks tend to be low-angle light in the early morning or late afternoon, or a dry summer when differential grass growth can pick out buried features that are otherwise invisible.