Ringfort (Rath), Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

Most ancient monuments leave something to see, even if only a grassed-over mound or a scatter of stone.

The ringfort at Cloghboola More, a roughly circular earthwork enclosure of about 45 metres in diameter, offers nothing of the sort. It was levelled long ago, and the pasture on the north-east-facing slope where it once stood shows no visible surface trace. What remains is a kind of archaeological ghost, traceable only through the hachured outline drawn by Ordnance Survey cartographers in 1842 and the fragmentary local memory recorded nearly a century later.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Writing in 1937, a researcher named Broker noted that a fort on land belonging to a Denny Lane had been destroyed, its location described in the evocative local term as being in a field called Lisin, some 100 spades from a second ringfort that lies approximately 70 metres to the south. Broker also recorded that a couple of heaps of stones remained at the site at that time, apparently left untouched, and that a man was said to have been buried near one of them. Whether that burial was ancient or more recent, the notes do not say. What makes the site stranger still is that two standing stones once flanked it: one immediately to the south, another roughly 25 metres to the north-west. Both are now gone. The clustering of a ringfort, a neighbouring enclosure only 70 metres away, and two standing stones within the same small area suggests this slope once held some significance, though the details of that significance have long since passed out of reach.

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