Ringfort (Rath), Farran, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
There is nothing to see at this site in Farran, County Cork, and that absence is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.
The ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, once sat in gently rolling pasture as a circular earthen bank roughly twenty-five metres across. It was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, 1903, and 1937, each edition noting the progressive erosion of its banks to the south-west and south-east. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, according to local accounts, whatever remained was levelled entirely. No earthwork, no rise in the ground, no visible trace survives.
What keeps the site in the archaeological record at all is not anything you can walk up to and touch, but a cropmark visible in aerial photography. A bivallate ringfort, meaning one defined by two concentric ditches rather than one, leaves its impression in the soil long after the banks above ground have been ploughed or bulldozed away. In dry summers, the filled fosses, the ditches that once ran around the enclosure, retain moisture differently from the surrounding subsoil, and growing crops above them respond accordingly, revealing the original plan of the site to a camera pointed downward from altitude. The aerial image shows the double-ditched circle still clearly, though its northern arc is cut through by the cropmark of a laneway, suggesting the modern field boundary runs directly across where the entrance or outer bank once stood.