Ringfort (Rath), Annagloor, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
A low arc of earthen bank in a Cork pasture field might not announce itself as anything remarkable, but the slight rise it crowns and the abrupt drop of ground to its south and east tell a different story.
This is the kind of site that rewards a second look: the interior sits noticeably higher than the surrounding field, a quality that was already being remarked upon in the 1930s, and the bank itself is still measurably present, incorporated now into the network of field boundaries that has grown up around it over centuries.
Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular enclosed area defined by one or more earthen banks and an outer ditch, or fosse. This example at Annagloor was recorded in 1934 by Bowman, who described a single-ramparted fort roughly 23 yards in diameter, with a bank standing around seven feet high and a fosse that had already been filled in by that point. The land at the time belonged to a D. Mulcahy. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1904, and 1936 all show a hachured circular enclosure at this spot, indicating that the feature was consistently recognised across nearly a century of mapping, with a diameter recorded at roughly 20 metres. What survives today is an arc of that original bank to the north-east, still reaching around 1.6 metres in height on its exterior face, while the broader enclosed area, now closer to 30 metres across, shows as a patch of rough, poorly grassed ground within the pasture. The natural topography here was almost certainly chosen deliberately: the sharp fall of ground to the south and east would have made the site easier to defend and more prominent in the landscape, reducing the amount of earthwork needed to achieve the same effect.