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The Dooradoyle Fort

by Mrs Fitzgerald's 4th Class

A few months ago we went to the Dooradoyle Fort, which is near our school. It is an old ring fort where the Celts used to live hundreds of years ago. In Irish, Dooradoyle is “Tuar an Daill”, which means “The Bleach-Green of the blind man”.

We counted 376 steps around the perimeter and 111 steps across the diameter. The fort is circular. Crumbling ramparts surrounds it and there are lots of trees growing in the fort. Unfortunately most of the building was made of wood, so it has rotted away over time.

Dooradoyle was famous for its holy well. This well was used to cure eye diseases but nobody knows for sure where exactly the well is.

Project

Our class made small huts out of little boxes to resemble Celtic ring fort buildings. We used Pringle containers, toilet rolls, baking powder tins and Jaffa cake boxes. We stuck cardboard roofs on the boxes. Then we stuck on matchsticks to make it realistic.
Everybody loved going to the Dooradoyle Fort.  Maybe we will go back there again.

After that we painted them brown. Some people made clay walls like ring forts.  Then we brought in moss to stick on the model as grass. We put the ring fort on a table and brought in toy cows and animals to put on it.

The Celts

The Celts were a vicious people who stole from others and loved fighting. Celtic people worshipped the cow.  It provided meat, milk and butter. Sheep provided mutton, milk and wool.  Pigs provided pork.

Celtic women were just as important as men. Some of these very famous Celtic women were Boudicca, a female leader of an English tribe called the Iceni; Queen Medb who caused the Tain Bo Cuailgne (a battle for a powerful bull); Scathach and Aoife who trained warriors and Morragan the goddess of death.
The Celts lived in hill forts, ring forts and crannogs. Crannog comes from the Irish word crann, which means tree. Ring forts were built in a circular shape and hill forts were constructed on a hill. Crannogs were very secure because they had hidden tunnels and pathways. They were built on manmade islands on lakes and easy to defend.

We can learn a lot about the Celts from the great stories, which they told and were written down hundreds of years later.

Archaeologists have dug up the remains of farms, graves, hill forts and sacred places all over the Celtic world.  These sites have also told us a lot about the Celts and their way of life.  

We have no books written by the Celts but Greek and Roman writers did write about them.  In the first century BC one such historian wrote:

“The women of the Gauls (the Celts in France) are not only like men in their stature but are a match for them in courage as well.”