Ringfort (Rath), Courtbrack, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
A stretch of old field fencing in Courtbrack, County Cork, turns out to owe part of its structure to something considerably older than any farmer's boundary-making ambitions.
A section of an early medieval ringfort, its bank still standing to a height of around 1.5 metres, has been quietly absorbed into the field boundary system here, its outer face still retaining its original stone cladding. This kind of absorption is not uncommon across the Irish countryside, but it does mean that a monument which once organised the life of a farming household, probably sometime between the sixth and twelfth centuries, now does quiet double duty as agricultural infrastructure.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is essentially a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and was the most common settlement type in early medieval Ireland, used as a defended farmstead for a family and their livestock. The Courtbrack example is roughly circular, with a diameter of around 40 metres. It appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1904, and 1937, each time rendered as a hachured circle, which suggests it was recognisable and reasonably intact across that century of mapping. When P. J. Hartnett visited in 1939, he noted that the bank was well preserved and that an entrance was still discernible to the north. The southern portion of that bank is what survives most visibly today, incorporated into the field fence but retaining its external stone facing, a detail that speaks to some care in the original construction.
