Ringfort (Rath), Clashroe, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
There is a particular kind of presence that comes with a levelled ringfort: not the drama of a towering earthwork, but something quieter and more ambiguous, a rough semicircle of ground where thistles have taken over from whatever once stood there.
At Clashroe in North Cork, a patch of disturbed pasture on a gentle west-facing slope is all that visibly remains of what local knowledge insists was once a ringfort, one of the enclosed circular farmsteads, typically enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, that were built across Ireland in their thousands during the early medieval period.
By the time Bowman recorded the site in 1934, it had already been reduced to little more than a memory in the ground. His description placed it on the land of one Ml. Duane, measuring approximately 28 yards in diameter, and classified it as a single-ramparted fort that had been levelled. That process of levelling, often the result of centuries of ploughing or deliberate clearance, has left the site divided in an odd way: the rough, overgrown area of about 40 metres survives on the northern side of an east-west field boundary, while to the south of that same boundary, no surface trace of the site remains at all. The field boundary itself may or may not be ancient, but it now bisects whatever once formed a complete circuit here.