Ringfort (Rath), Grange (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A small earthwork sitting in wet Limerick pasture might not seem like much to look at, but this ringfort in the townland of Grange offers something relatively rare: a detailed excavation record that tells us exactly how one early Irish farming family organised their daily life within a banked enclosure barely thirty metres across.
The site sits roughly forty metres south-west of a tributary of the Camoge River, which also marks the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Ballingoola, and it was already noted on the 1897 Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map as a roughly circular earthwork, with a small feature annotated as a well twenty-five metres to the north-west.
A ringfort, to give the basic definition, is a circular or near-circular enclosure bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a defended farmstead rather than a military installation. This particular example attracted the attention of scholar O'Kelly in 1944, who listed it as an earthwork of Type A with a possible hut site or barrow in its south-east quadrant. Excavations followed in 1948, carried out by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and Máire MacDermott, whose published account from 1949 remains the key record. They found that the bank was low, with a height difference between ditch floor and bank top of only fifty to eighty centimetres, and that the outline was not truly circular; the bank ran almost straight along the north and south-east sides. Inside, a roughly five-metre-diameter hut had been built on a deliberately laid clay floor around twenty centimetres thick. No post-holes survived, but charred wood at the north-west entrance to the hut may have been the remains of a lintel or threshold. Fires had been lit both inside and in the open area nearby. The excavators concluded that the clay floor and the surrounding bank and ditch were constructed together as a single project, with the practical aim of creating a slightly drier working area above the surrounding peat, and that the entrance was placed on the west side because rising ground in that direction offered a firmer approach.
The earthwork is in agricultural land and is not formally set up for visitors, so access depends on the usual courtesies around farmland. The outline of the enclosure has remained visible on aerial imagery through the 2010s, appearing as a D-shaped form with a notably straight northern edge, with internal dimensions of roughly seventeen metres north to south and nineteen metres east to west. Anyone with an interest in the site would do well to consult the 1949 paper by Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott before visiting, as the published contour plan gives a clearer sense of the earthwork's shape than anything visible on the ground today.