Ringfort (Rath), Knockardsharriv, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knockardsharriv, Co. Cork

On the crest of a hill east of Ketragh Glen in north Cork, there is a ringfort that no longer exists above ground.

What makes its absence interesting is how well-documented that disappearance is, traced across nearly a century of maps before the site finally vanished from the landscape altogether. A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one leaves nothing for the eye to catch.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the fort clearly, showing a hachured circular enclosure approximately forty metres in diameter. By 1905 and 1937, the same maps showed only an arc of solid line, suggesting the earthwork was already losing definition. A researcher named Bowman, writing in 1934, noted the fort as a single-ramparted enclosure of roughly thirty-three yards across, situated in land belonging to a P. O'Connell. Even then, two thirds of the rampart had been levelled, with the remaining section pressed into service as a boundary fence, the fate of many such monuments on productive farmland. By the time the site was re-examined in more recent years, local information confirmed that whatever had survived to that point had been levelled entirely. The pasture on the hill crest now gives no indication that anything once stood there.

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