Ringfort (Rath), Claraghatlea, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Claraghatlea, Co. Cork

Two ringforts sitting roughly fifty metres apart in the same field is not something you encounter every day, and the one at Claraghatlea adds a further curiosity beneath ground level: a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind early medieval communities used for storage or refuge, runs beneath its interior.

The fort sits on a break in a north-facing slope at the foot of Claragh Mountain, and the surviving section of its earthen bank, still standing close to two metres high on the interior side, has been absorbed into the modern field fence system, which gives it a slightly doubled life, partly ancient monument, partly working agricultural boundary.

The ringfort is roughly circular, around thirty metres in diameter, and was originally defined by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, around a metre deep. That full circuit no longer survives intact. According to local information, the bank to the north and east was levelled around 1966, leaving only a low rise in the ground where it once stood. What remains of the bank runs from the south around to the northwest, still substantial enough to read clearly in the landscape. Its neighbour, a second ringfort, lies in the same field to the east, close enough that the two enclosures were almost certainly part of a single farming or social arrangement during the early medieval period, when ringforts served as the enclosed homesteads of farming families rather than purely military strongholds.

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