Ringfort (Rath), Ballinvoher, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
On a gently south-facing slope at Ballinvoher in north County Cork, a ringfort has been reduced to almost nothing, its presence betrayed now only by a slight rise along a field fence.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built between the early medieval period and around the twelfth century. They usually consisted of one or more earthen banks and ditches forming a circular enclosure around a homestead, and thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside. This one has not fared well against the pressure of working farmland.
The clearest picture of what once stood here comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, which recorded the site using hachuring, the technique of short lines used to indicate earthwork features and their slopes. At that point the enclosure was still legible as a circular form, with a smaller circular feature marked at its centre, possibly the trace of a structure within the interior. Even then, a north-south field boundary was already cutting across the enclosure slightly off its eastern centre, dividing it awkwardly, and a semicircular arc on the western side appeared to abut that same boundary. The relationship between the field boundary and the earthwork suggests the land was already being carved up for agriculture by the mid-nineteenth century, with the ancient enclosure gradually subordinated to the needs of the working farm.
Since then, tillage has completed what the field boundary began. The earthworks have been levelled, and the site today survives only as a marginal topographic hint, a low rise at the western edge of a field fence, the kind of detail that rewards a careful eye but offers little to the casual glance.