Ringfort (Rath), Ballygrace, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballygrace, Co. Cork

Near the top of a hill in Ballygrace, in the north of County Cork, there is a field that holds almost nothing visible and yet marks the site of a structure that once organised the life of an early medieval farming family.

A faint circular depression in the pasture is all that remains of a ringfort, the kind of enclosed settlement, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, that was built in Ireland in considerable numbers between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one measured approximately thirty metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size for a single-family enclosure of its type.

The clearest record of the site comes not from the ground but from paper. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 recorded it as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand surveyors used to indicate an earthwork with sloping sides. At that point it was apparently still sufficiently legible in the landscape to be worth noting. Sometime between that survey and the present, the banks were levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement, a fate that befell a great many Irish ringforts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as land was cleared and consolidated. What the map preserved, the land subsequently lost.

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