Ringfort (Rath), Castlequarter, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Castlequarter, Co. Cork

Sitting atop a hill in tillage ground at Castlequarter in County Cork, a roughly circular earthwork has been quietly ploughed around for centuries, its form still legible despite the best efforts of agriculture and encroaching vegetation.

It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. These enclosures, typically dating from the early medieval period roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, served as defended farmsteads for a single family or small community, and thousands of them survive across the island in varying states of preservation.

This particular example measures approximately 42 metres north to south and just over 41 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical size for the type. Two earthen banks define the enclosure, separated by a fosse, which is simply a ditch dug to provide the material for piling up the banks. A further fosse runs along the northern exterior. Both banks are heavily overgrown, with the inner bank standing around 0.7 metres and the outer bank slightly less at 0.6 metres. There is a gap in the inner bank to the north-east, and the principal entrance faces south-east, approached by a causeway crossing the ditch. Inside, the ground rises gently from the banks and then flattens into a shallow bowl, what surveyors describe as a saucer-shaped interior, the characteristic result of the way material was scraped inward and outward during original construction.

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