Dawn in Rathangan, a village with a Quaker history, situated in the barony of Offaly East, in Co Kildare. It lies on the fringes of the great Bog of Allen in what is a predominantly flat landscape. On a slight rise overlooking the Edenderry road stands a typical early 19th-century Protestant church, its austere, simple design made more impressive by the dignified tree-lined approach. This avenue, though calm and gracious in daylight, becomes unsettling in the dark, as is typical of many trees; the ones here assume the shape of ghostly presences. The surrounding churchyard, dating from 1700, is somewhat older than the church building. It is unusually well-kept and, as is well-known, the more uniform a site, the less atmospheric it often proves.
But even so, all churchyards become more mysterious and unsettling as the mist rises off the grass and the leaning gravestones become shadows, or perhaps waiting figures - all depending on your imagination, the darkness and, at this time of the year, the proximity of Halloween. Rathangan has a dramatic range of late Georgian and Victorian architecture, including a beautiful stone bridge dating from 1784, but most exciting of all is the mighty tree-flanked platform ringfort near the chapel. The church and its grounds to the north of the village act as an atmospheric divide between the old world it represents in the context of an increasingly suburbanised landscape and this dramatic ancient monument.
To the left of the churchyard wall lie open fields and the ringfort encircled by a great, deep ditch. The vague dark shapes between you and it are silent cattle. Once you cross the church wall and enter the field to approach the ringfort, they begin their protest, which is surprisingly intimidating because of the darkness. A circle of tall trees appears as a guard of honour flanking the perimeter of the ringfort.
Described in ancient sources as "the fort opposite the oakwood", it rises up out of the field. To mark the beginning of the new century, many of the villagers joined in a candlelit procession. Most had gathered to participate in a religious celebration that began at the rath and ended in the local Roman Catholic church at the opposite end of the village.
But other pilgrims remained at the ringfort, wondering about the lives of the ancients. There are many theories but few hard facts about ringforts, no doubt because any structures within them were made of timber. But, as Frank Mitchell points out in Reading the Irish Landscape, the Rathangan ringfort, one of the few to be dated from historical sources, symbolised the contrasts between the brief lives of mortal ownership and what had proved, even long ago, to be its enduring importance and longevity. This "fort opposite the oakwood" is celebrated in an eighth-century poem: "Once it was Bruidge's, it was Cathal's,/It was Ard's, it was Ailill's,/It was Conaing's, it was Cuiline's/And it was Maelduin's./The fort remains after each in his turn,/And the kings asleep in the grounds." Not all ringforts are as striking as the one in Rathangan.
Ireland's most common, and undervalued field monuments, the ringforts are circular enclosures usually made of earth, sometimes of stone (and called "cashels"). Often covered in gorse or bracken, at times by patches of woodland, they dominate the landscape to such an extent as to be almost invisible. Aerial photography has proved vital in the identification of many sites. There are more than 45,000 - there may once have been 60,000 to 80,000 - of them scattered throughout the country, some in areas of high density such as Co Sligo and elsewhere in north-east Connaught, west Clare, south-east Ulster, and in a band stretching from the north midlands of counties Meath, Cavan, Longford and Westmeath down to the Shannon region.
Unlike so many monuments, they were not built to honour the dead, nor were they ritual sites. Most had extremely practical functions.
For the archaeologist, these enclosures (many of which were lost with the coming of tillage farming and more recently undermined or destroyed through development) represent intense settlement from the early Christian period, constructed over a 300-year period, from the early seventh century until the late ninth. Ringforts were used to protect cattle from the frequent raids on livestock, but they were also centres of community and are perhaps the earliest manifestation of feudalism.
Dairy farmers lived and worked within them. Kings, or at least powerful local lords, may also have sustained their households behind the protective embrace of a ringfort; however, they were not defensive or military structures in the usual sense of the the word "fort". Nor should they be confused with similar earthen structures such as hill forts, which have a distinct personality, as do the great raths or meeting-places of specific ritual significance such as Navan Fort in Co Armagh, or D·n Ailinne, Co Kildare, which dates from much earlier, possibly the second century, and was not a settlement.
The word "rath" frequently occurs in Irish placenames. While ringforts did not come under official scrutiny until the 19th century, with the arrival of the Ordnance Survey, the increased interest of antiquarians and development of agriculture as a business, they already had a place in the popular imagination. While archaeologists and geographers define the ringfort based on increasingly scientific investigation, scholars of folklore, oral tradition and social history see them in a different context, as a physical image or symbol testifying as to where legend, native beliefs and scepticism meet.
The ringfort, with its purpose so clearly defined in early settlement, is also prominent in the type of stories that don't feature in archaeological texts. For a rural population, the local ringfort was not a monument but an object more respected than revered as it, in many cases, symbolised fear of a capricious supernatural threat. The fairies were believed to reside within them. No God-fearing man or woman in their right mind would tamper with them. To destroy or build on one was to invite the wrath of spirits known to be territorial.
Maps of 19th-century Ireland show many examples of bizarrely winding roads, roads marked by detours devised specifically not to interfere with ringforts or, in the more common rural usage, raths or fairy forts. The only time it was deemed acceptable to enter one was in the hope of reclaiming a person who had been spirited away by the fairies. There were cynics, however, and many, at least according to stories passed down through the generations, met horrible ends as fairies marched through houses that burnt down or collapsed and people disappeared, often leaving wretched changelings in their place.
"Fairy fort" became the language of the non-professional classes; as "rath" was increasingly used by officials, even "fort" was no longer as common.
Still, folklore lingered regardless of the findings or theories of archaeologists, particularly with the emergence of dedicated amateur folklorists such as Lady Gregory. Just as the antiquarian Sir William Wilde had earlier often waived the eggs and fowl offered in payment for fees in exchange for a story or local myth, Lady Gregory travelled the countryside in an attempt to preserve a rapidly disappearing store of local oral history.
One such trip in the west of Ireland was recorded by her in "Irish Superstitions", an article published in the Spectator on April 20th, 1895. "The old ring-shaped raths or fairy forts are always fairy haunted. I remember one day searching in vain for one we had been told of. We asked a countryman riding by if he knew of it, but he could not recognise it by any description 'till my husband said, on chance, 'a place the fairies come to'. 'Oh, the place where the fairies do be; I know that well enough,' he said, and pointed out the way."
The complex relationship of science and myth relating to the Irish ringfort is meticulously explored in Angela Bourke's study, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London, 1999).
Two pioneering names in Irish archaeology are closely associated with the investigation of ringforts. The first is the seriously overlooked Thomas Westropp (1860-1922), whose book, The Ancient Forts of Ireland: Being a Contribution Towards our Knowledge of their Types, Affinities and Structures, was published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1902. His contribution to ringfort study has been acknowledged by historical geographer and cartographer Matthew Stout in a valuable recent book, The Irish Ringfort (Dublin, 1997).
The other is Seβn P. ╙ R∅ordβin (1905-1957). Having succeeded another major figure in Irish archaeology, R.A.S. Macalister, ╙ R∅ordβin spent 18 years researching Lough Gur in Co Limerick and introduced modern excavating techniques to Ireland. It is his definition of ringforts that Stout chooses to refer to.
According to ╙ R∅ordβin: "In its simplest form the ringfort may be described as a space most frequently circular, surrounded by a bank and fosse or simply by a rampart of stone. The bank is generally built by piling up inside the fosse the material obtained by digging the latter. Ringforts vary very considerably in size. In the more elaborately defended examples, the defences take up a much greater area than that of the enclosures."
Perceptions of ringforts and their uses vary as much as the monuments themselves. As anyone who has brought a mildly interested party along to show them a ringfort and has been disappointed with their guest's response will agree, earthworks are the most difficult of monuments to appreciate.
In fact, the best viewing of these special places is from the air. Of nowhere is this more true than of the magnificent royal site of Tara, probably the most venerated place in Ireland, the seat of the High Kings of Ireland. Imagination must be called upon at the rounded hump of the Hill of Tara, a complex of grass-grown mounds and earthworks. Admittedly it was more a ritual site than one of settlement. Included among a number of earthworks is the Mound of the Hostages, the oldest monument, a passage grave. It stands in a large hillfort enclosure, in the middle of which stands two linked ringforts, the Royal Seat and Cormac's House, distinguished by having two ditches and two banks.
Also on the hill is the triple-banked Rath of the Synods, unwittingly vandalised in the early 20th century by a party in search of the Ark of the Covenant. Some of the most technologically advanced computer-based excavation techniques have been used at Tara. But, as with all ringfort or earthen structures, mortality stalks the site, reminding the visitor that most of what was once here was made of timber and has long since disappeared, leaving enclosures of earth to hint at the stories.