Ringfort (Rath), Clonmult, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Clonmult, Co. Cork

There is nothing to see at this particular site in Clonmult, east Cork, and that, in its own quiet way, is the point.

A ringfort once stood here on a west-facing slope above marshy ground, a circular earthwork roughly twenty-five metres across, and today it leaves no visible trace on the surface whatsoever. The land has simply absorbed it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead within one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were built and occupied largely between the sixth and tenth centuries, and tens of thousands once existed across the country. The Clonmult example was recorded as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1936, which means it was still legible in the landscape at that point, at least from a cartographic survey perspective. At some stage between that mapping and more recent inspection, whatever earthwork remained was lost entirely, ploughed out, silted over, or gradually levelled by agricultural activity. What the 1936 map captured was already, most likely, a shadow of the original structure.

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Pete F
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