Ringfort (Rath), Taur More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Taur More, Co. Cork

On a gently sloping pasture in Taur More, north County Cork, the remains of a ringfort survive in a state that requires a certain kind of attention to read.

Most of the enclosure has been levelled, but a curved arc of earthen bank, running roughly south-east to south, still holds its shape to an interior height of around 0.7 metres, with an external fosse, a defensive ditch, dropping to a similar depth alongside it. What was once a complete circular enclosure, roughly 30 metres across, is now legible mainly as a fragment.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earthwork rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. By 1936, when the Ordnance Survey captured this one on its six-inch map, the enclosure was already reduced to a hachured arc, cartographic shorthand for a partial bank, arcing from east through to west-north-west. Somewhere along the way, the rest was lost to agricultural clearance. A well was dug into the ground beside the surviving bank and fosse at the south-east, suggesting the land around the old enclosure continued to be worked even after the structure itself had largely disappeared. Coniferous trees have since been planted in the immediate area, which will have altered the feel of the site considerably from the open pasture in which the earthworks originally sat.

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Pete F
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