Ringfort (Rath), Lisballyfroot, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lisballyfroot, Co. Kilkenny

In the pastureland of Lisballyfroot, a ringfort was dug up and then erased, and today the only way to trace its outline is to look down at it from a satellite.

That is an oddly fitting end for a site that had already been quietly diminishing for decades before anyone thought to excavate it. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1839, shows a roughly circular enclosure in reasonable completeness, but by the time the 1900 revision was made, a substantial stretch of the outer bank, running from the north-north-east around through east to south, had already been removed. Sixty years later, what remained was gone.

The fort was a bivallate type, meaning it had two concentric enclosing elements rather than one. The inner enclosure measured roughly 23 metres in diameter, with an earthen bank reinforced by a stone core; beyond that lay a waterlogged fosse, a defensive ditch, and then an outer bank bringing the overall diameter to around 40 metres. In November 1950, Gearóid Ó hIceadha of the Office of Public Works conducted a partial excavation before the monument was cleared as part of Land Project works, a mid-century state scheme to improve agricultural land that claimed a considerable number of earthworks across Ireland. Cuttings were made through the eastern and southern quadrants outward from the centre, along with several smaller trenches. What came out of the ground was modest but telling: a stone-lined hearth, a spindle whorl used in hand-spinning thread, an iron knife, and hones for sharpening blades. There was no pottery and no bone, which makes dating and interpretation difficult, though the domestic nature of the finds is consistent with the ringfort's function as an enclosed farmstead, the most common settlement form in early medieval Ireland.

The monument has been fully levelled at ground level, but its circular ghost persists in satellite imagery, where crop or grass variation still traces the lines of the old fosse and banks. It is the kind of site that rewards looking rather than visiting.

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