Ringfort (Rath), Castlekevin, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
Some ancient sites announce themselves with towers or earthworks you can see from a road.
This one, a rath sitting in level tillage on a slight rise in Castlekevin, County Cork, has almost entirely dissolved back into the farmland around it. A rath is an Early Medieval ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, the fosse, used as a farmstead by an Irish family of some local standing. Here, the fosse has left only a cropmark, a faint discolouration in growing crops that becomes legible from the air, where it traces a south-to-north arc. At ground level, the surviving trace is described as a barely perceptible low rise, curving roughly south-west across a span of around twenty metres.
What makes the site quietly interesting is less what remains than what the aerial evidence reveals about what was once there, and what the immediate landscape adds to the picture. Around ninety metres to the south-south-east lies a second rath, this one recorded as fully levelled. The proximity of the two enclosures is not unusual in Cork or across Ireland more broadly; raths frequently occur in clusters, reflecting the density of Early Medieval settlement across the island between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. That two should survive in such close proximity here, even in this reduced state, offers a faint outline of what was once a worked and inhabited landscape.