Ringfort (Rath), Glentrasna, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
At the corner of a pasture field on a gently west-facing slope in Glentrasna, County Cork, a nearly perfect circle sits quietly in the grass, its outline blurred by a thick covering of ferns.
It measures roughly 28 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, making it a reasonably substantial example of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort constructed from earth rather than stone. These were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its outbuildings within a raised bank and an outer ditch, and many thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation.
Here, the enclosing earthen bank still stands about a metre high, and the fosse, the external ditch that would have provided the material to build the bank, survives to around 0.6 metres in depth. A gap in the bank to the south-west likely marks the original entrance, a feature that appears with some regularity in ringforts of this type. The interior slopes inward toward the same direction, which may reflect the natural topography of the hillside site. What is less clear, as with so many of these earthworks scattered across Cork and the wider country, is precisely who built it or when it was in use, details that would require excavation to establish with any confidence.