Ringfort (Rath), Caherbaroul, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Caherbaroul, Co. Cork

There is a field in Caherbaroul, Co. Cork, where an entire archaeological monument has simply ceased to exist above ground.

A ringfort once stood here, a circular earthwork enclosure of around 28 metres in diameter, most likely the fortified farmstead of an early medieval Irish family. Today there is no bank, no ditch, no trace of any kind visible at the surface. The field is pasture, and that is all it appears to be.

The only surviving record of the enclosure as a physical feature comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it was marked as a hachured circular form, the conventional cartographic shorthand of the period for an earthen enclosure with raised edges. By the time the site was assessed for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, it had been levelled entirely, the earthworks graded flat, most probably through agricultural improvement at some point between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth. The place-name Caherbaroul is itself suggestive, with "caher" deriving from the Irish cathair, a term often applied to stone or earthen fortified enclosures, hinting that this landscape may once have held more than one such structure.

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