Mound, Rathclare, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Rathclare, Co. Cork

In a field beside the Awbeg River in north Cork, there is a mound that is no longer really a mound.

What was once a raised oval earthwork, roughly twenty metres along its longer axis and ten metres across, has been levelled so thoroughly that only a low scarp on its north-eastern edge hints at where its perimeter once ran. That faint ridge in the pasture is about all that remains to mark the spot.

The mound was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where cartographers used hachuring, a system of short radiating lines used to indicate raised ground, to depict the oval form sitting roughly forty metres east of the Awbeg. Even then it was presumably already reduced, or at least unremarkable enough that it merited only a topographic notation rather than any named classification. What makes its position quietly interesting is the proximity of a moated site lying approximately fifty-five metres to the south. Moated sites are a particular feature of medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a rectangular or square enclosure surrounded by a water-filled or dry ditch, associated with Anglo-Norman settlement from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Whether the mound and the moated site were ever functionally related is not recorded, but their closeness, both to each other and to the river, suggests this corner of Rathclare was once a more structured and inhabited landscape than the open grazing land it presents today.

There is very little left to see on the ground. The low scarp to the north-east is the only surface trace, and even that requires some patience and a degree of trust in the map evidence to locate and interpret.

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