Ringfort (Rath), Kilberrihert, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilberrihert, Co. Cork

What survives at Kilberrihert today amounts to little more than a slight rise in a pasture field, yet successive Ordnance Survey maps spanning nearly a century quietly tracked this ringfort's slow disappearance.

Mapped in 1842 as a circular earthwork roughly thirty metres across, it had grown, on paper at least, to thirty-five metres by 1905, only to shrink to twenty-five metres by 1937 before being levelled entirely. That the cartographers kept returning to record it at all speaks to how visible it once was on the gentle west-facing slope.

When the antiquarian Bowman visited in 1934 and published his findings, the fort was still legible on the ground as a single-ramparted enclosure, measuring thirty-nine yards in diameter and sitting on land belonging to a Mr O'Callaghan. The surrounding fosse, a defensive ditch, was ten feet wide and three feet deep, and the interior ground was noticeably raised above the surrounding field, as is typical of a rath, the Irish term for this class of enclosed farmstead, generally dating to the early medieval period. More unusual was what Bowman found beneath it. He recorded two souterrains, underground stone-lined passages or chambers that were commonly built beneath and within ringforts, used variously for storage, shelter, or refuge. One lay in the north-east quadrant of the interior; the second was set into the north-west section of the rampart itself. A lime kiln, a simple stone-built structure used to burn limestone into agricultural lime, was also noted on the north-west bank as early as the 1842 map, suggesting the site had been put to practical use long before its earthworks were finally cleared away.

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