Ringfort (Rath), Ballygrissane, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballygrissane, Co. Cork

What survives at Ballygrissane is, in a sense, almost nothing, and that is precisely what makes it worth a moment's attention.

Atop an east-west ridge in County Cork, a near-perfect circle of flattened ground, roughly 32.5 metres across, is all that remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was once a low earthen enclosure used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. The bank that once defined it now stands no higher than 0.2 metres, barely enough to cast a shadow, and the interior is level pasture.

The site has a quietly legible paper trail. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 recorded it clearly, using hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate an earthen bank or mound, to show a complete circular enclosure. By the time later editions of the same map were produced, only an arc of those hachures remained, suggesting the earthwork was already diminishing. Local information points to the site being levelled around 1960, a fate that came to a great many ringforts across Ireland during the mid-twentieth century, when agricultural machinery made it practical to remove features that had simply been farmed around for generations. The result is that the monument now exists more as an absence than a presence, its shape preserved in the ground rather than above it.

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