Ringfort (Rath), Ballyenahan, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyenahan, Co. Cork

On a north-facing slope at Ballyenahan in County Cork, a circle of stones sits quietly in what is now tillage land.

There is no earthen bank, no visible enclosure, no dramatic outline rising from the field. What remains is a roughly circular concentration of stones, the last physical trace of a ringfort, or rath, that was once a substantial feature of this landscape before being levelled, most likely by agricultural clearance at some point after the nineteenth century.

Ringforts were enclosed farmsteads, typically of early medieval date, in which a family and their livestock lived within a circular bank and ditch. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands once scattered across the country, though a great many have been destroyed by ploughing and land improvement over the centuries. The Ballyenahan example was still visible enough in 1842 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year, depicted as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately forty metres. Hachuring on early OS maps was the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork, indicating the surveyors could clearly see a raised or banked form at the time of their fieldwork. That it has since been levelled entirely, leaving only the stone scatter, suggests the site was cleared sometime in the century and a half after that survey was completed.

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