Ringfort (Rath), Curraduff, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Curraduff, Co. Cork

Sitting at the edge of a spur on a steep south-facing slope in Curraduff, this earthen ringfort commands the kind of elevated position that tells you something about why it was built.

A ringfort, or rath, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and most likely used as a farmstead or small settlement. What sets this one apart is the scale of its surviving earthworks: the internal bank rises to a maximum height of four metres, which is considerable for a structure that has been sitting in a pasture field for over a millennium.

The enclosure is almost perfectly circular, measuring twenty-eight metres across in both directions. An external fosse, a defensive ditch cut into the ground, runs from the south-southwest around to the east-southeast, accompanied by a counterscarp bank, the raised lip on the outer side of the ditch, which survives to a height of 1.2 metres along the southern and northern arcs. The entrance, four metres wide, opens to the south. Inside the enclosure there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that in early medieval Ireland typically served as a place of storage or concealment. These features together suggest a settlement that was designed with both everyday practicality and a degree of defensibility in mind, using the natural topography of the slope as part of its overall strategy.

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