Ringfort (Rath), Templenacarriga, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Templenacarriga, Co. Cork

Something quietly odd happened between 1842 and 1936 on a south-facing slope in Templenacarriga.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped this earthwork in 1842, they recorded it as a square enclosure, roughly 22 metres on each side. By the time surveyors returned nearly a century later, the same site appeared on their maps as a circular one, open to the south. Whether the earlier cartographers were working from imperfect ground observation or whether the earthwork genuinely reads differently depending on conditions and season, the discrepancy has never been resolved, and it gives the site an unusual place in the documentary record.

What survives today is a roughly circular area, approximately 25 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, enclosed by an earthen bank that stands about 1.4 metres high on the interior and 0.7 metres on the exterior, running from the west around to the south-east. A scarp, reaching 2 metres in height, continues from the south-east back around to the west, and a shallow fosse, the defensive ditch typically dug just outside a ringfort's bank, can be traced along the north-east to south-east arc. The interior slopes downward toward the south, overlooking a stream valley below. This is a rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, a class of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the sixth and tenth centuries, when such enclosures served as the defended homesteads of farming families across the Irish landscape. Writing in 1917, a scholar named Power noted souterrains in connection with this site. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages, often used for storage or as places of refuge, and their presence here, if they survive, would add considerably to the archaeological interest of the enclosure.

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