Ringfort (Rath), Knocknaraha, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knocknaraha, Co. Clare

On a ridge top in County Clare, an Early Medieval ringfort sits in marshy pasture, its circular earthworks still readable in the ground despite centuries of encroachment by gorse, rushes, and shifting field boundaries.

What makes this particular rath, a type of enclosed farmstead commonly built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, quietly striking is its double-walled construction and the way its summit position gives it a commanding sweep of the surrounding landscape, even as the monument itself sinks slowly into the boggy ground.

The site is bivallate, meaning it was defended by two concentric banks rather than the single ring that characterises most Irish raths. The outer circuit, some sixty metres across at its maximum extent, consists of an earthen and stone bank, a flat-bottomed fosse or ditch, and a lower outer bank beyond that. The inner bank still carries traces of stone facing on its interior side at the east and north-west, suggesting that whoever built and maintained this enclosure put considerable effort into its construction. A slight lowering in the inner bank at the south-south-west, aligning with what appears to be a causeway across the fosse, is thought to mark the original entrance, the point where inhabitants and livestock would have passed in and out. The monument was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1840 and 1916, though it was labelled only as an enclosure rather than identified as a rath until later survey work. At the centre of the interior, partially obscured by the undulating, rush-covered ground, is a separate house site, a later occupation of a space that had already been in use for well over a thousand years.

The site sits alongside a modern farm road to the north, and while the outer bank has been absorbed into a field boundary on that side, the south-west and north-north-west sections remain traceable. The gorse that smothers the eastern and western portions of the inner bank makes a full circuit difficult, but the entrance causeway at the south-south-west and the better-preserved sections to the north offer the clearest sense of the monument's original scale and form.

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