Ringfort (Rath), Lackendarragh, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lackendarragh, Co. Cork

What survives of this ringfort in Lackendarragh is, in a sense, more interesting for what it tells us about centuries of agricultural pressure than about any single dramatic event.

The circular enclosure that once measured roughly 25 metres across has been largely levelled into the surrounding pasture, yet an arc of its earthen bank persists along the eastern side, quietly absorbed into the local field boundary system. The shallow external fosse, a defensive ditch that would originally have ringed the outside of the bank, is still faintly traceable, now reduced to a depth of around 0.2 metres.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common type of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead with one or more earthen or stone banks and accompanying ditches. This particular example appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1904, and 1938, each time shown as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographers' shorthand for an earthwork rising above the surrounding ground. By the time Bowman noted it in 1934, the site on E. Linehan's land was already showing signs of wear: the bank still stood to around six feet, the fosse was partially infilled to a width of about fifteen feet, and the interior sat roughly two feet higher than the level of the field outside. That slight elevation, a consequence of accumulated occupation material and the geometry of the original construction, is often one of the last things to disappear as farmland gradually reclaims a site.

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