Ringfort (Rath), Smithfield, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Smithfield, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at this site.

That, in a sense, is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. In a field of level pasture in north Cork, where the land opens northward across the Blackwater River valley and westward toward Mount Hillary, a ringfort once stood that has left no trace whatsoever on the ground beneath your feet. It exists now only in old paper and older cartography.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period as farmsteads or places of habitation. This one measured approximately thirty metres in diameter and was still visible enough in 1842 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year, rendered in the characteristic hachured lines surveyors used to indicate an earthen enclosure. By the time the archaeologist Bowman noted it in 1934, it was already listed among the levelled examples on the land of W. Mullane, alongside a second ringfort nearby. Bowman's record, published that year, is one of the few anchors this place has to documented history. At some point between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, the bank was ploughed or pushed flat, and whatever profile it had held for perhaps a millennium was absorbed back into the field.

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