Ringfort (Rath), Dromcummer More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dromcummer More, Co. Cork

What survives of this ringfort at Dromcummer More is largely invisible at ground level, yet aerial photography reveals its full outline with surprising clarity.

A cropmark, the faint differential growth of grass or crops above buried archaeology, traces the complete circuit of the original enclosure: an inner bank, an intervening fosse, and an outer bank, all pressed into the soil of a north-facing ridge in north Cork. The fosse, a defensive ditch that once separated the two earthen ramparts, partially survives as a landscape feature on the ground, respected by a heavily overgrown field boundary that curves from northwest to northeast along the monument's northern side. The boundary itself may even incorporate the remnants of the outer bank, the two features having quietly merged over generations of agricultural use.

When Bowman documented the site in 1934, the monument was still readable as a raised, saucer-shaped area roughly thirty-three yards in diameter. The inner bank stood approximately fourteen feet above the base of the fosse, the fosse itself was around fifteen feet wide, and the outer bank rose to about six feet. Even then, one-eighth of each rampart had already been levelled. The Ordnance Survey maps tell a story of gradual attrition: the 1842 six-inch map shows the eastern defences already partially cleared, and by the editions of 1904 and 1938 that eastern arc had been entirely removed. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and a bivallate example, one defended by two concentric banks and ditches rather than just one, would have indicated a household of some status. A second bivallate ringfort sits approximately eighty metres to the south, suggesting this ridge in Dromcummer More was a significant focus of early settlement.

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