Ringfort (Rath), Derreennalomane, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Derreennalomane, Co. Cork

A low earthen ring sitting on a natural knoll in West Cork pasture land, this rath at Derreennalomane is the kind of place that rewards a second look.

The enclosing bank still stands to an internal height of 2.2 metres, giving the roughly circular interior, which measures 31 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, a genuine sense of enclosure even after more than a thousand years of weathering and grazing. What catches the attention, though, is the entrance arrangement to the south-south-east: a 4-metre-wide gap with a causeway running through it, and a counterscarp bank, the outer, lower bank that typically runs parallel to the main one, continuing right across the top of that causeway to connect with the main bank on both sides. It is a small but deliberate piece of defensive or at least boundary-conscious engineering.

Raths, the earthen equivalent of the stone-built cashel, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, broadly in use from around the fifth to the twelfth century. They sheltered a family, its livestock, and its stores within a raised bank, and the more elaborate the entrance, the more status, or perhaps caution, the occupants wished to project. The counterscarp bank continuing over the causeway here suggests that whoever built this enclosure was not prepared to leave even the threshold gap undefended. Inside the bank, cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis are still visible crossing the interior, the faint corrugations of lazy beds or earlier tillage that speak to agricultural use long after the rath's original occupants had gone. The site sits at the base of a south-south-east-facing slope, which would have offered some shelter from prevailing westerly weather while keeping the entrance open toward better-drained, lower ground.

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