Ringfort (Rath), Glenfield, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
East of Glenfield House in north County Cork, overlooking the Awbeg River, a ringfort once rose from a tillage field with a bank standing between five and eight feet high and a surrounding fosse, or ditch, cut three feet into the ground.
It no longer exists. According to local information, it was levelled around 1974, leaving the land flat and unremarkable where an earthwork of roughly 45 metres in diameter had endured for well over a thousand years.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period and serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household. This one appears to have been a single-ramparted example, meaning one bank and one fosse rather than the more elaborate multiple enclosures found at higher-status sites. It was recorded as early as 1842 on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, depicted as a hachured circular enclosure, and it appeared again on the 1905 and 1936 editions as a clearly raised circular area. A researcher named Bowman noted it in 1934, recording the dimensions with some precision and placing it on the land of a Mrs Sharpe. That published detail fixes it in time as a known, measured, documented feature of the landscape, which makes its subsequent disappearance in the early 1970s the more pointed fact.
Nothing survives to see here now. The Awbeg River, which Edmund Spenser once farmed alongside a few miles downstream at Kilcolman, still runs to the east, but the earthwork that overlooked it for centuries has been absorbed back into agricultural ground. Its presence on successive Ordnance Survey maps across nearly a hundred years is itself a small record of how long something can persist before it does not.