Ringfort (Rath), Dromcummer More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
What survives of this early medieval enclosure in Dromcummer More is, in one sense, almost nothing, and in another sense, rather a lot.
The earthworks are largely levelled, the inner bank heavily overgrown and absorbed into a modern field fence, and the whole thing sits quietly in pasture near the top of a south-facing ridge, doing a reasonable impression of ordinary farmland. Yet the circular form persists, roughly forty metres east to west and thirty-five and a half metres north to south, and in dry summers the underlying archaeology reasserts itself as a cropmark, the buried banks and intervening fosse printing themselves in fading grass for anyone who happens to be looking from the air.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is the most common type of monument in the Irish landscape, a circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches that served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly the fifth to twelfth centuries. What distinguishes this one is that it was originally bivallate, meaning it carried two concentric ramparts rather than one, a feature associated with higher-status settlements. When Bowman recorded it in 1934, the dimensions were still legible: an inner bank roughly nine feet high, an intervening fosse about eighteen feet wide, and an outer bank standing around six feet, all on land belonging to a J. Ahern. Even then, approximately half of the inner rampart had already been levelled and the interior was noticeably raised. The Ordnance Survey had been mapping the enclosure since at least 1842, and by the 1938 six-inch revision it was already being described as degraded on the southern side. A second bivallate ringfort of the same type lies around eighty metres to the north, which suggests this part of the Dromcummer More ridge was once a more densely settled landscape than its present pastoral quiet would suggest.