Ringfort (Rath), Mullagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
A low scarp in a tillage field is not the most dramatic thing in West Cork, yet the slight earthwork atop a drumlin at Mullagh marks the ghost of a rath, an early medieval enclosed farmstead of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands.
The enclosure is sub-circular, measuring roughly 23.9 metres north to south and around 30 metres east to west, its boundary now reduced to little more than a gentle slope in the ground. That it survives at all in cultivated land is worth noting; centuries of ploughing have erased countless similar sites across the country.
Raths typically served as the defended homesteads of farming families during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, with a bank and ditch defining a domestic space that might contain timber buildings, storage pits, and other traces of daily life. What makes this particular example of quiet interest is the possible presence of a souterrain in the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, usually associated with ringforts and thought to have functioned variously as a refuge, a cool-storage space, or both. The drumlin setting, a smooth rounded hill of glacial drift, would have offered the original occupants a modest but useful elevation over the surrounding land.