Ringfort (Rath), Coole, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
By 1963, a triple-ramparted ringfort that had survived on a south-facing slope in Coole, County Cork, for well over a millennium had been levelled.
What was once recorded as a substantial enclosure, roughly 60 metres in diameter with three concentric earthen banks, left no visible trace on the ground. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory.
The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map captured it clearly, a ringfort of the kind known as a rath, the commonplace but genuinely ancient form of enclosed farmstead used across Ireland from the early medieval period into the first millennium. Three ramparts would have placed this example at the more elaborate end of the scale; most surviving raths have a single bank and fosse, and multiple enclosures are generally associated with higher-status settlements. By the time the same area was surveyed again for the 1904 and 1935 OS editions, the site had already been reduced to little more than an anomaly in a field boundary, described as a kink in an east-west fence line. That the earthworks could still be read even faintly in the landscape at that stage makes their complete removal a few decades later all the more pointed. Local information places the final levelling at around 1963, a period when agricultural improvement schemes across Ireland eliminated a great many such features with little record made beyond what earlier maps had already captured. A possible second ringfort survives approximately 200 metres to the north-east, suggesting the area may once have supported a small cluster of enclosed settlements.
