Ringfort (Rath), Ballinaboy, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballinaboy, Co. Cork

What survives of this ringfort at Ballinaboy is, in a very practical sense, half a monument.

A field fence running north to south cuts the site in two, leaving only the western portion legible, and even that has been levelled by centuries of agricultural activity. A slight depression along the northern edge is the clearest indicator that a fosse once ran here, a fosse being the encircling ditch that, combined with an earthen bank, gave a rath its defensive or status-marking boundary. A scatter of stones across the area of the site is all that visibly remains above ground.

The original enclosure measured approximately forty metres in diameter, a size consistent with the kind of single-family farmstead that dotted the Irish landscape during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes this site particularly useful as a document of slow erasure is its appearance on three consecutive Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, those of 1842, 1902, and 1934, each of which shows the western half of the circular enclosure marked with hachures, the short lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature. Between the first survey and the last, the shape of what was recorded barely changed, because the eastern half had already been lost to the field boundary long before the mapmakers arrived. The tillage that now occupies the ground has done the rest, gradually smoothing what the fence did not claim.

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