Ringfort (Rath), Lisgoold, Co. Cork
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Ringforts
The most telling thing about this ringfort near Lisgoold in East Cork is how little of it remains above ground, and yet how clearly it was once there.
A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, would originally have presented a raised bank and ditch marking out a farmstead or place of status. Here, that enclosure has been reduced to a barely perceptible eroded bank, retaining an internal height of only around 0.8 metres, its curve absorbed into a north-south field fence as the land was brought into agricultural use across the centuries.
The earliest reliable record of the site comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure approximately thirty metres in diameter, the hachuring indicating a raised feature on the ground at the time of survey. By later editions of the same map series, the circular form had already collapsed into a simple curve in the field boundary, suggesting the levelling happened during the nineteenth century or shortly after. The enclosure left no other surface trace. Roughly 120 metres to the north-north-west, a second possible ringfort has been identified, raising the quiet possibility that two such sites once sat in relatively close proximity on this north-east-facing slope, overlooking the same pastoral ground that still surrounds them today.