Ringfort (Rath), Ballycurrany, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballycurrany, Co. Cork

Sitting in open pasture on a south-facing slope in County Cork, this ringfort has held its ground for well over a thousand years, largely unannounced and unvisited.

A rath, as this type of earthwork is known, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically built between the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a family and their livestock would have lived within a raised bank for both status and security. What gives this particular example a quiet presence is the scale of that enclosure: the interior earthen bank still rises to around four metres, enough to make the circular space it defines feel genuinely contained.

The rath measures roughly 32 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south, making it a fairly substantial example of its type. Its entrance faces south-east, an orientation common in Irish ringforts, possibly for reasons of light and shelter. Around the south-west to east arc of the outer edge runs a fosse, the term for the ditch dug to provide material for the raised bank, now heavily overgrown. The combination of the surviving bank height and the fosse, even in its current state, gives a reasonable sense of the original layered earthwork, bank above and ditch below, that would have defined this enclosure when it was a working settlement in the landscape.

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