Ringfort (Rath), Kilberrihert, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilberrihert, Co. Cork

Some places are notable precisely because there is nothing left to see.

In the pastureland of Kilberrihert in north County Cork, a ringfort once stood that has been so thoroughly levelled it leaves no visible surface trace whatsoever. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically circular earthwork enclosures surrounded by one or more banks and ditches, used as farmsteads during the early medieval period. This one, measuring roughly 25 metres in diameter, was clear enough to be recorded as a hachured circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, meaning cartographers of the time could still make out its form. At some point after that, it disappeared entirely into the surrounding ground.

The site was one of two such levelled forts noted by Bowman in 1934, described in the context of land then belonging to Daniel Foley and D. Kinneally. Bowman recorded the two enclosures with diameters of 31 and 35 yards respectively, figures that correspond closely with the earlier Ordnance Survey depiction. Both were classed as single-ramparted, meaning each had just one enclosing bank rather than the multiple concentric rings found at more elaborate sites. That relative simplicity was common across the Irish countryside, where thousands of such forts once dotted the agricultural landscape. The fact that these two were already gone by the time anyone thought to write them down formally says a great deal about how quietly and completely this category of monument was erased from the land during the intervening centuries of agricultural improvement and field clearance.

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