Ringfort (Rath), Cloghmacow, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloghmacow, Co. Cork

On a south-facing slope in County Cork, part of an ancient enclosure has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape, its earthen bank now doubling as a field boundary.

The arc that survives, running from west round to south, still stands to a height of roughly 2.34 metres, its outer face lined with trees. Walk the field edge here and you are, without any formal marker or sign, tracing the curve of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the circular embanked enclosures that served as farmsteads across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards.

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand of the time for a raised earthwork. By the 1904 and 1943 OS revisions it is recorded as oval, with a diameter of approximately 25 metres. That consistency across a century of mapping gives some sense of how intact it remained well into the twentieth century. The southern to western section is a different story. Local information places its levelling in the early 1960s, a period when agricultural improvement schemes across Ireland saw many such earthworks removed to make fields more workable. That loss is now invisible at ground level; there is no surface trace of where the bank once continued.

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