Ringfort (Rath), Ballymague, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballymague, Co. Cork

There is nothing left to see at Ballymague, and that absence is itself the most telling thing about this site.

Somewhere on a south-east-facing slope in North Cork, below the crest of a hill now given over to tillage, a ringfort once occupied roughly forty metres of ground. A rath, to use the Irish term, is an earthen enclosure, typically circular, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead and status marker. This one has been levelled so completely that no surface trace remains.

The only surviving record of the enclosure's shape comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, where it was recorded as a hachured circle, the cartographic shorthand of the time for an earthwork feature. That map represents one of the earliest systematic efforts to document Ireland's landscape in detail, and for sites like this one it has become the primary evidence of existence. At the time of the survey the ringfort was still legible enough to be drawn. At some point after that, cultivation erased it. Even the field boundary that once bisected the enclosure on a north-west to south-east axis has since been removed, taking with it the last faint organisational trace of what had been there.

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Pete F
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