Ringfort (Rath), Boherascrub, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Boherascrub, Co. Cork

In the tillage fields of Boherascrub in North Cork, the faint outline of an ancient enclosure still shows in the ground, though the structure that once rose above it is long gone.

A ringfort, known in Irish as a rath, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used primarily as a farmstead during the early medieval period. This one measured approximately 34 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, and its single bank had an entrance facing east. It was, by all accounts, a modest but typical example of a monument type that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland.

What makes this particular site quietly melancholy is the precision with which its disappearance can be traced. The Ordnance Survey mapped it as a hachured circular enclosure, roughly 35 metres in diameter, on both its 1842 and 1905 six-inch maps. By the time the 1937 edition was surveyed, the cartographers were recording something slightly different: a circular area of around 25 metres enclosed by a fosse, which is the term for the external ditch that typically accompanied a bank. Whether the structure had already begun to erode by then, or whether the mapping conventions had simply changed, is difficult to say. What local information makes clear is that whatever survived into the late twentieth century was levelled around 1978 or 1979. The low, gently sloping scarp that remained afterwards is all that now defines the perimeter of a place that had stood, in some form, for well over a thousand years.

The site sits on a gentle north-east-facing slope, currently under tillage. The scarp is subtle enough that it could easily pass unnoticed to anyone not looking for it, and without the map record to anchor it, the history of the place would have been entirely swallowed by the field.

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