Ringfort (Rath), Dromidiclogh, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dromidiclogh, Co. Cork

On the eastern slope of a ridge called Laurel Hill in west Cork, there is a field that holds something invisible.

No bank, no ditch, no upstanding earthwork of any kind remains to suggest that this was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the circular enclosed farmsteads that were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What exists instead is an absence, a place that archaeology can point to on a map but that the eye cannot find.

Ordnance Survey maps from both 1842 and 1902 recorded a circular enclosure on this spot, meaning the structure was still legible on the landscape into the early twentieth century. Sometime around 1930 it was levelled, most likely cleared to improve the agricultural usefulness of the ground. The landowner noted afterwards that the outline of the circle would reappear in dry conditions when the field was not under crop, a phenomenon known as a cropmark or soilmark, where buried features affect the growth or colour of plants above them and briefly make the past visible again. Since then, no surface trace has been recorded.

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Pete F
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