Ringfort (Rath), Ballyveerane, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyveerane, Co. Cork

Beneath a south-west-facing pasture in Ballyveerane, a circular earthwork roughly thirty metres across has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

What was once a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built during early medieval Ireland typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a homestead, has been levelled so completely that no surface trace remains. The only evidence that it was ever there at all comes from old maps.

The 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a partial arc of hachuring running from the south around to the west-north-west, the cartographic shorthand used at the time to indicate an earthen bank or raised feature. By 1938, a later survey edition depicts the full circular raised area, still hachured, still approximately thirty metres in diameter. At some point after that, the feature was levelled, probably as agricultural land was improved and consolidated. What makes the site more than a blank field, however, is the possible presence of a souterrain in its interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement sites, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of food supplies. Whether this one survives intact beneath the pasture is uncertain, but its recorded existence hints that the original enclosure may have been a working farmstead of some complexity, not merely a simple banked enclosure.

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