Ringfort (Rath), Aghills, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
On a north-facing slope in West Cork, the land makes a small but deliberate argument against the hillside.
A circular earthen enclosure, roughly twenty-five metres across, sits in pasture along an east-west ridge, its interior platform artificially levelled on the northern side to counteract the natural gradient. Someone, more than a thousand years ago, went to considerable trouble to make the ground inside feel flat.
This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Raths are enclosed farmsteads, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, built by raising an earthen bank around a circular living area. The bank here still stands to about 1.6 metres, and the fosse, the external ditch dug to provide the material for that bank, is still visible, though largely silted up over the centuries. The entrance faces east-north-east and is a generous six metres wide, wide enough for livestock as well as people, which is exactly the point. These were working agricultural enclosures, not fortifications in any military sense, despite the name ringfort that later generations attached to them. The surrounding field fences that once subdivided the area have since been removed, which means the enclosure now sits somewhat exposed in open pasture, its circular shape reading more clearly against the landscape than it might once have done when absorbed into a network of later boundaries.
