Ringfort (Rath), Egmont, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Egmont, Co. Cork

On a south-facing pasture slope in Egmont, County Cork, a ringfort exists now mostly as an absence.

Around 1974, according to local information, the earthwork was levelled, reducing what had been a measurable circular enclosure of roughly 22 metres in diameter to little more than a slight rise in the ground. Yet the site refuses to disappear entirely. Aerial photography has revealed its fosse, the encircling ditch that once defined the rath, still visible as a cropmark, a ghostly outline produced when differential soil moisture causes grass or crops above buried features to grow and colour differently from the surrounding field.

Ordnance Survey maps chart the slow erasure. The 1842 and 1905 six-inch editions both show the enclosure rendered with hachures, the cartographic convention used to indicate raised earthworks. By the 1937 edition it is still present, marked as a circular raised area, suggesting it survived more or less intact through the first half of the twentieth century. What makes the Egmont site particularly interesting, even in its diminished state, is its relationship to a second, larger ringfort immediately to the north. The aerial cropmark evidence shows the fosse of this smaller enclosure conjoining with the outer fosse of its neighbour, meaning the two were physically linked, sharing or abutting their boundaries. Paired or conjoined ringforts are known elsewhere in Ireland, and their relationship, whether sequential in date, associated with the same household, or serving different functions within a single settlement, is rarely straightforward to interpret.

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Pete F
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