Ringfort (Rath), Dromrastill, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dromrastill, Co. Cork

A townland boundary runs straight through the middle of this ringfort on a hilltop in Dromrastill, Co. Cork, slicing the enclosure off-centre so that half of it survives as overgrown earthworks while the other half has been almost entirely levelled.

The boundary line, oriented roughly NNW to SSE, has effectively created two different fates for the same monument: on the western side of the fence, the banks and ditches remain, tangled and waterlogged; on the eastern side, the ground has been cleared for tillage and little survives above the surface.

The fort is what archaeologists call a bivallate ringfort, meaning it was defended not by a single enclosing bank and ditch but by two concentric earthen banks, each with its own fosse, the term used for the ditch or trench cut alongside a bank. The internal diameter runs to around 29 metres north to south, and the interior sits noticeably higher than the surrounding field, a common feature of these early medieval enclosures, which typically date from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century and served as defended farmsteads. On the surviving western side, the inner bank still stands to an external height of nearly two metres, its inner face sloping gently down towards the raised interior. The outer bank is somewhat lower at around 1.4 metres but has a sharper, more defined profile. The intervening fosse between the two banks is shallow, around 0.3 metres deep, and waterlogged toward the west. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1905 recorded the enclosure as a simple circular feature, but by the 1936 edition it was marked as bivallate, suggesting either improved surveying or changes in what was visible on the ground. An aerial photograph confirmed what the fence line now hides: the levelled eastern portion still leaves cropmarks in the tillage, the buried ditches and banks faintly betraying themselves through differential growth in dry conditions. There is also a possible souterrain within the interior; a souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage associated with ringforts, likely used for storage or refuge.

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