Ringfort (Rath), Dromore, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dromore, Co. Cork

A modern housing estate presses up against one side of this ancient enclosure, a single house stands on the other, and between them survives a circular earthwork that was already old when the first stone was laid anywhere nearby.

The contrast is quietly arresting: a ring of raised ground, thirty metres across and thick with overgrowth, holding its shape in the middle of a landscape that has moved on entirely.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common class of monument in the Irish countryside. These enclosures, typically dating from the early medieval period roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. They are defined by a raised earthen bank, known as a rampart, and usually a corresponding outer ditch, or fosse. At Dromore, the internal face of the bank stands around 0.85 metres high and the external face slightly higher at 1.1 metres, with a shallow fosse surviving to the east. A gap of about two metres in the bank to the north-north-west likely marks the original entrance. What makes this particular example more interesting than its modest dimensions might suggest is the presence of two possible souterrains in the partially overgrown interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, built beneath a ringfort, most probably for food storage or as a place of refuge in times of danger. Finding two within a single enclosure this size is notable, though both await fuller investigation.

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