Ringfort (Rath), Dromore, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
What remains of this ringfort in Dromore is, by any measure, very little: a low circular rise no more than half a metre high, a faint depression where a fosse once ran, and a field of pasture on a gentle south-westerly slope.
That barely-there outline is enough to trace the ghost of an early medieval farmstead, the kind of enclosed settlement, typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, that once dotted the Irish countryside in its tens of thousands. The rath, as this type of earthwork is also known, would originally have consisted of a raised bank, a surrounding ditch or fosse, and possibly an outer bank beyond that. Here, the outer bank has vanished entirely.
The site had already suffered considerable damage before anyone thought to record it carefully. When Bowman noted it in 1934, citing it as a single-ramparted fort of roughly 31 yards in diameter on land belonging to a C. O'Flynn, about five-sixths of the circuit had already been levelled. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map had shown a clear hachured circular enclosure; by the 1938 revision, the interior scarp was still traceable in places, but the outer bank was reduced to a partial hachured arc on the western to southern side. Whatever survived into the mid-twentieth century was cleared around 1966, according to local information. The interior measured approximately 42 metres across at its fullest extent, though the surviving earthwork today is somewhat smaller, at around 34 metres. Of particular archaeological interest is a souterrain in the interior, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval ringforts, probably used for storage or refuge.
The site sits in ordinary farmland, and there is little to dramatise the visit. The surviving rise is low enough to be easily missed, and the fosse reads more as a gentle hollow than a defined feature. What makes it worth knowing about is less what can be seen than what the documentary record reveals: a site watched, measured, partially described, and then quietly finished off, its final levelling logged only through local memory.