Mystery of raths can be clarified

I WAS visiting a friend the other day and he mentioned that he had a well-preserved rath on his farm and invited me to come and look at it.

Raths or ring-forts are the commonest archaeological feature in this country, though many have disappeared due to urban sprawl and road-building. One source suggests their average density in rural Ireland is as much as one every two square kilometres and they are usually marked on Ordnance Survey maps.

The one on my friend’s farm was fairly typical, a roughly circular earth bank enclosing a space with a diameter of something between 30 and 40 metres. Raths range in size between about 20 metres in diameter up to more than 60. Sometimes there are two or even three concentric circular banks with ditches between them from which the earth was excavated. In parts of the country where earth is in short supply they are made of free stone.