Fairies and folklore often build upon our ancestors' works

Located mostly on top of many small hills or drumlins, they generally date from the 5th to the 11th Century AD.

Raths are not to be confused with the larger hill forts, which date from the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age, or with tree rings planted as landscape features in the 18th Century.

Designed as a circular, oval, or D-shaped banked platform and ditch, most range in size, varying from 25 to 50 metres in diameter.

They were large enough to contain thatched family dwellings and shelters for farm animals.

In upland areas, they were built of stones and are known as cashels or stone forts, and over the centuries the stones were often removed to build boundary walls, roads, and dwellings.

Some of our raths were impressive indeed. Inhabited by high-status local leaders, the largest had up to two or three defensive banks, and ditches topped with circular wooden palisades.

As defensive farmsteads, they had commanding views of the surrounding landscape and were often intervisible to enhance security between a wider kin or kingship grouping.

Clustered together in this fashion, raths provided the inhabitants with some protection against cattle raiders and wolves.

There are 40-50,000 raths in Ireland. Most are unprotected, and in various states of decay, reshaped over time by field boundaries and eroded by stock.

Despite many having been ploughed out, or bulldozed to make way for fields, roads, and houses, we have unintentionally protected others down through the centuries through our continued belief in superstition.

Tales abound of fairy forths inhabited by the ‘little people’, or fairies, and to this day many landowners will not touch or damage raths for fear that ill luck may follow those who dare destroy a rath or cut a hawthorn tree in or around one.

Stories of destruction or damage are often accompanied by gory accounts of what became of the perpetrators, and are told with delicious schadenfreude as if to underline how deserved the retribution was.

But not all is as it seems. Heritage monuments are often multi-layered, as succeeding generations used and reused the sites for different purposes for possibly thousands of years. So too, some of our raths may be older than we think.

Archaeological digs on raths are uncommon, as it is generally assumed that it is known what lies beneath them. However, what was found in the early 1980s at a Clogher Valley rath turned this on its head.

Below two layers of occupation – linked naturally enough to the Early Christian and Medieval periods – a third layer was discovered in the pre-rath ground surface.

Finds included flint scrapers and pottery shards from the early Bronze Age, indicating that the site was possibly settled by Beaker People, which pushed its date of occupation back by at least 3,000 years.

Named for the distinctive style of their pottery, Beaker People are believed to have brought metal working to Ireland from Europe between the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods, some 2,500 years BC.

They introduced ceramics, stone wrist guards for bowmen, arrowheads and the earliest metalworking in copper and gold into our culture, and possibly an early form of the Irish language.

Their arrival marked changes in beliefs, customs, burial practices, and the end of the Neolithic culture of megalithic passage tombs associated with Newgrange and Knowth.

Standing on the rath today, one can only wonder at why these early people chose this site, and speculate at what they contemplated as they gazed out on the river and the ancient, wooded landscape we now call the Blackwater and Clogher Valley.

More reason, then, for us to protect our remaining raths in case they too may have more to reveal.

Perhaps the fairies have been in and around some of our raths for longer than we thought. Metal working was a magical alchemical process, after all.

To read reports about excavations undertaken near you, see www.excavations.ie.