Ringfort (Rath), Garraun, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Garraun, Co. Cork

On an east-facing slope at Garraun in mid Cork, a double-banked ringfort sits within working tillage land, its outer earthworks partly swallowed by bushes and briars while the inner bank, still rising to 2.6 metres, holds its shape in grass.

The combination of two concentric earthen banks with a fosse, or defensive ditch, between them places this in a category sometimes called a bivallate rath. Ringforts of this kind were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically occupied between the sixth and tenth centuries, and a double circuit of banks generally indicated a household of some local standing.

The site measures roughly 48 metres east to west and just over 47 metres north to south, making it a reasonably substantial enclosure. The intervening fosse drops to about 1.9 metres in depth, and there is a noticeable break in the inner bank to the south-east, which may mark the original entrance. What sharpens the picture considerably is an 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map that shows a hachured circular hut site inside the enclosure, roughly ten metres in diameter. Hachure marks on those early OS maps were used to indicate a depression or raised feature on the ground, suggesting that traces of an internal structure were still legible to the surveyors in the nineteenth century, even if little of it is obvious today. Adding a further layer of interest, a standing stone lies just outside the enclosure to the east, a separate monument whose relationship to the fort is not recorded but whose proximity is unlikely to be coincidental.

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Pete F
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