Ringfort (Rath), Ballyvorisheen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
On a gentle east-facing slope in Ballyvorisheen, a ringfort has largely disappeared into the pasture around it, yet it has not vanished entirely.
A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosed farmstead dating typically from the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches; thousands of them survive across Ireland, though many, like this one, have been severely reduced by centuries of agriculture. What remains here is barely perceptible at ground level: a low rise in the grass, no more than twenty centimetres above the interior surface and thirty-five centimetres above the exterior, tracing an oval of roughly thirty-four metres east to west and twenty-nine metres north to south. There is a slight depression to the south-east where the outer fosse, the ditch that originally accompanied the bank, has left its impression, and a break in the rise to the east hints at where an original entrance may once have been.
The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately forty metres, suggesting it was still legible in the landscape at that time, if not yet greatly reduced. By the time of more recent survey work, levelling had taken its toll. What the eye struggles to read on the ground, however, aerial photography has confirmed: a cropmark showing the circular outline of a bank and external fosse is visible from above, the buried archaeology expressing itself through differential growth in the overlying vegetation. This is a common phenomenon on levelled earthworks, where soil compaction or moisture retention in buried features produces subtle but telling variations in crop or grass colour when viewed from altitude.