Ringfort (Rath), Barrinclay, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Barrinclay, Co. Cork

On a south-east-facing slope in Barrinclay, County Cork, there is a ringfort that no longer exists in any visible form.

The field above it grows crops, the ground is level, and nothing interrupts the surface to suggest that something once stood there. That absence is itself the story.

A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead. This particular example was bivallate, meaning it had two concentric rings of banks, which placed it among the more substantial examples of the type. It measured approximately 35 metres in diameter. Cartographers recorded it on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1904, marked with hachures to indicate the raised earthworks. Sometime between the early twentieth century and the present, the site was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity, and the earthworks were lost entirely to tillage.

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Pete F
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