Ringfort (Rath), Cloghane By.), Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloghane By.), Co. Cork

What survives at Cloghane townland in County Cork is a double-banked ringfort, a type of enclosure that once served as a defended farmstead across early medieval Ireland, and this particular example retains enough of its original form to give a clear sense of the effort that went into its construction.

The site is a roughly circular, slightly raised platform, measuring 53 metres north to south and 52 metres east to west, enclosed not by one earthen bank but by two, with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. That second line of defence was a mark of some status; most ringforts, known in Irish as raths, made do with a single bank and ditch, so the presence of an additional outer rampart suggests this enclosure belonged to a household of above-average standing within its community.

The inner bank still stands to an internal height of around 1.15 metres, while the outer bank reaches approximately 1.5 metres and is stone-faced in parts, meaning the earthen material is reinforced or revetted with stone along sections of its face. This combination of earth and stone construction is relatively common in West Cork, where field clearance left plenty of loose material to hand. Two breaks in the banks, one to the south-east and one to the west, correspond to original causeways, the deliberate gaps that served as formal entranceways across the fosse and through the defences. Their survival helps clarify the orientation of the original enclosure and hints at the routeways that once approached it.

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