Ringfort (Rath), Cahergal, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cahergal, Co. Cork

On a south-east-facing pasture slope at Cahergal in County Cork, a pair of concentric earthen banks quietly describes a circle in the grass, enclosing a space that once constituted someone's world.

The outer bank, standing just over a metre high, is the more substantial of the two, though it carries a gap on its south-eastern side roughly five and a half metres wide, the kind of break that typically marks an original entrance. Inside, the ground is uneven in ways that reward a second look.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a class of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Where stone ringforts, known as cashels or caherS, advertise themselves through their masonry, a rath is earthwork all the way: banks thrown up from the soil of the fosse, the encircling ditch, dug beside them. Here the fosse between the inner and outer banks is shallow and intermittent, suggesting either partial infilling over the centuries or a construction that was never entirely finished. The inner bank is the lower of the two at only around twenty centimetres in height, much spread from its original profile. The overall enclosure measures 38.5 metres across in both directions, a near-perfect circle. Within the northern half, slight surface irregularities hint at what may be the remains of a hut site. In the southern half, a low linear bank about twelve metres long runs from north-east to south-west, its original function unclear, perhaps a partition, perhaps something older still overlaid by the ringfort itself.

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Pete F
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