Ringfort (Rath), Curraghanearla, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Curraghanearla, Co. Cork

Beneath a pasture in Curraghanearla, Mid Cork, lies a ringfort that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

The site is listed, catalogued, and assigned coordinates, yet there is nothing left to see. No earthwork rises from the grass, no ditch catches the evening shadow, no trace of the rampart survives at the surface. It is, in a quiet and somewhat philosophical sense, a place defined entirely by its absence.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically circular, bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as defended homesteads for farming families. This particular example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographers' standard method for indicating a raised earthwork, with a diameter of approximately 45 metres. Nearly a century later, the archaeologist Hartnett, writing in 1939, noted that the track of the rampart was still faintly traceable, giving an overall diameter of around 90 feet, which corresponds closely to that earlier measurement. At some point between that observation and the present, whatever remained was levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement of the land, which has since remained in pasture. The 1842 map is now the clearest evidence that the enclosure ever existed in physical form.

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Pete F
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