Ringfort (Rath), Muingyroogeen, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Muingyroogeen, Co. Cork

Beneath a tangle of gorse and briars on a north-west-facing slope in north County Cork, two concentric earthen banks quietly hold their shape.

The site is technically inaccessible, swallowed by overgrowth, yet its outline has been legible on Ordnance Survey maps since 1842, first as a simple hachured circle, then, by 1904, unmistakably bivallate, meaning it has a double ring of banks enclosing a central space roughly 25 metres across. The road to the north-east and a field boundary to the south-east have each taken a bite out of the perimeter, but enough survives to trace the structure from east-south-east around to the west.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was built across Ireland in early medieval times, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, to shelter a family, their livestock, and their stores. What makes this particular example more than ordinarily interesting is the detail preserved by a 1934 account from a researcher named Bowman, who visited when the site was still accessible and recorded it under its Irish name, 'Lisin na Mealbhog', on land belonging to a T. O'Connor. Bowman measured the inner rampart at around seven feet high and the outer at five feet, with an intervening fosse, that is, a ditch, some fifteen feet wide. The overall diameter he put at thirty-five yards, somewhat larger than the modern survey estimate. Concealed within the northern half of the interior is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was commonly used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a place of refuge. Just to the west of the ringfort sits what may be a ringbarrow, a low circular burial mound, which, if confirmed, would suggest the site sits within a landscape carrying memories considerably older than the fort itself.

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