Ringfort (Rath), Commeen, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Commeen, Co. Cork

On a south-facing slope at Commeen in County Cork, there is a field where a ringfort once stood, and now nothing remains.

The site was levelled around 1981, leaving no visible surface trace in the tillage ground that replaced it. It is, in the most literal sense, an absence worth knowing about.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular settlement dating typically to the early medieval period in Ireland, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. The Commeen example was described in 1918 by an observer named O'Leary as medium-sized and circular, with earthen fences standing between four and five feet high. That description, recorded in print, now constitutes almost the entirety of what can be known about its appearance. Whatever else the enclosure contained, whatever domestic life it sheltered across its centuries of use, was erased when the banks were pushed flat. The date of around 1981 is precise enough to feel recent, which is part of what makes this site quietly unsettling. Ireland lost enormous numbers of ringforts to agricultural clearance during the twentieth century, particularly during the decades when land improvement schemes incentivised the removal of earthworks considered obstacles to modern farming.

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