Ringfort (Rath), Leamaneigh More, Co. Clare

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Leamaneigh More, Co. Clare

Leamaneigh More sits in the Burren, that limestone plateau in north Clare where the ground is so bare and fractured that early medieval farmers built their homes and farmsteads inside circular earthen enclosures simply to assert some boundary between themselves and the landscape.

A rath, as these ringforts are commonly known, was typically a raised earthen bank enclosing a family's dwelling, sometimes reinforced with a timber palisade, serving as a combination of homestead boundary, livestock pen, and social statement. Tens of thousands of them survive across Ireland, making them among the most numerous archaeological monuments in the country, yet each one marks a particular family's decision to settle a particular patch of ground, usually sometime between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

The Leamaneigh More example sits close to a townland whose name most Clare people associate with Léim an Fhia, meaning the deer's leap, and with the ruined tower house of Leamaneh Castle nearby, itself connected to the O'Brien family and the formidable Máire Rua O'Brien of the seventeenth century. The ringfort predates all of that by many centuries. Ringforts in the Burren tend to survive in unusually good condition because the thin soils and exposed rock made later agricultural clearance difficult, leaving earthworks and stone-walled equivalents, called cashels or cahers, relatively undisturbed across the plateau.

Because detailed survey information for this particular site has not yet been made publicly available, the specifics of its diameter, condition, and any associated features remain unconfirmed. What can be said is that the Burren rewards slow movement and close attention, and a rath that has endured here for well over a thousand years is most legible in low winter or early spring light, when shadows pick out the curve of a bank that might otherwise read simply as a slight rise in the ground.

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