Ringfort (Rath), Glengarriff More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Glengarriff More, Co. Cork

On a south-facing slope in Glengarriff More, a ringfort once occupied a commanding position over the surrounding landscape.

Today there is nothing to see. The earthwork has been levelled, its banks absorbed into agricultural land, and no visible surface trace remains. What makes the site worth noting is precisely that absence, and what the older record reveals about what stood here and what was lost.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, with field fences radiating outward to the west, north, and east, suggesting the rath was still a legible feature of the landscape at that point and that the surrounding field system had grown up around it. A rath is a type of ringfort, typically a raised circular earthwork defined by one or more banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or defended enclosure during the early medieval period. Writing in 1923, a researcher named Power noted that the area contained three such lioses, each with its rampart standing around seven feet high, and recorded that a fourth had already been destroyed by that date. The site catalogued here appears to be that fourth, though by the time Power was writing the loss was already fact. The sequence is a familiar one in the Irish midlands and south: an early medieval enclosure survives into the nineteenth century, appears on maps, is noted by antiquarians, and then disappears within a generation or two as land use intensifies.

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