Ringfort (Rath), Lisgoold, Co. Cork

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Ringfort (Rath), Lisgoold, Co. Cork

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.

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