Ringfort (Rath), Corgreagh, Co. Cavan
Co. Cavan |
Ringforts
Most of the roughly 45,000 ringforts scattered across Ireland have been worn down to barely a ripple in the landscape, ploughed out, built over, or absorbed quietly into farmland over the centuries.
The one at Corgreagh in County Cavan has fared rather better, and its particular survival is part of what makes it worth attention. A raised circular area, measuring approximately 29 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west internally, it retains the outline of a double-banked enclosure, a form known as a multivallate rath, which generally signals a site of some social significance in early medieval Ireland. A rath is an earthen ringfort, typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more banks and ditches, and the presence of two banks here, separated by a wide berm, that flat shelf of ground between the outer bank and the inner ditch, points to a degree of effort and status beyond the ordinary single-bank enclosure.
The outer fosse, the external ditch beyond the outer bank, is now only legible along a stretch running from the north-north-east around through east to the south-south-east. Elsewhere it has been lost, and the outer bank itself has been modified and absorbed into a field boundary, which is a very common fate for these structures. Farmers across many generations found the existing earthworks convenient to adapt rather than remove, and so the monument survives in a partial but recognisable form. The original entrance, as with a notable proportion of Irish ringforts, faced roughly east-south-east, an orientation that recurs often enough across the country to suggest it was deliberate, though whether for practical, cultural, or symbolic reasons remains a matter of discussion among archaeologists.