Lios, Ráth and Dún: The Fairy Fort Hiding in Your County

Ireland has around forty five thousand ringforts and the map still remembers nearly all of them. Learn five Irish words and you will start seeing them all over your own county.

There is a ring in a field near you.

A low circular bank, maybe a ditch outside it, usually a few trees growing out of it and the grass inside a slightly different colour. The field has been ploughed around it for two hundred years and never through it. If you ask why, you will get an answer about luck, and about a man who levelled one and regretted it.

We have written about what those rings actually are, and what is often hidden underneath them. This is about something else: the fact that you may be living in one without knowing, because the name of your town has been telling you so the whole time.

There are a great many of them

Estimates vary and the sources are not always clear about whether they mean what was built or what still stands, but the figure usually given is around forty five thousand, and some put it higher. Either way it is an enormous number of earthworks for a small island, and most of them are roughly a thousand to fifteen hundred years old.

They were not forts in the castle sense. A ringfort was a farmstead: a bank and a ditch around a house, a byre and a bit of ground, built to keep cattle in and wolves and raiders out. Ordinary people, living ordinarily, for centuries.

And when the people who built them named the places they stood in, they named them after the fort.

Five words that mean fort

Almost all of them come down to five Irish words. Learn these and a great deal of the map opens up:

The split between them is not random. Lios and Ráth are the earthen ones, the banks of clay and turf that make up the great majority. Caiseal and Cathair are built of dry stone, which is why you meet them most in the west and the south west where the stone was to hand and the soil was not. Dún tends to be grander: a stronghold rather than a farmstead.

Reading a few real ones

Here is what the official records give, with the fort word in each:

Notice how many of them end in a person. That is the pattern: a fort word, then whose fort it was. Those people are mostly gone past recovering now, but their names are still printed on road signs and letterheads and GAA jerseys, a thousand years after they died.

The one that has two

The best of them is in Co. Clare. Lisdoonvarna is Lios Dúin Bhearna, and it carries two fort words at once: lios, the ringfort, and dún, the fort, with bearna, a gap, after them. The ringfort of the fort of the gap.

Put that one into our Placename Explorer and it will take it apart word by word and say each piece aloud.

When the tool says it does not know

Try Rathmines in it and you will get Ráth, ringfort, and then it will tell you plainly that it cannot place Maonais.

That is deliberate. A place-name can hold a person, a saint, or a word that has fallen out of Irish entirely, and a decoder that guesses at those produces confident nonsense. It is better to hand you the part that is solid and be honest about the rest. The authoritative record, for any name, is logainm.ie, the state's own Placenames Database.

Go and find yours

So: look up your own town, your townland, the road you grew up on. If it begins with Lis, Rath, Cashel, Caher or Doon, there was a fort there, and there is a fair chance the ring of it is still sitting in a field half a mile away with nobody willing to touch it.

That is the quiet joke of the Irish map. The language was pushed off the signposts and out of the schools, and it simply went on describing the country anyway, in plain sight, to anyone who learned five words.

• Put your own place-name in
• What a fairy fort actually is, and the souterrains beneath
• An interactive cutaway of a ringfort, with the Irish for every part

Irish forms here are the official ones from logainm.ie, the Placenames Database of Ireland, © Government of Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0. Counts of surviving ringforts vary between sources and are given here as the commonly cited figure rather than a settled one.