Ringfort (Rath), Kilclogh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
A low rise in a pasture field is often all that remains of a ringfort, and this one at Kilclogh in mid Cork is no exception.
Once a roughly circular earthwork enclosure about 25 metres across, it has been levelled to the point where only the faintest swell in the ground marks where it stood. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead within one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation; many more have been quietly erased.
What makes this particular site worth noting is the way its story of gradual disappearance can be traced through successive maps. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets of 1842 and 1904, the enclosure is shown with hachuring, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthwork with visible relief. By the 1937 edition, that confident symbol had been replaced with a broken line, indicating the feature was already compromised or uncertain on the ground. A road, described as the old Kerry road, cuts across the north-eastern side of the enclosure and appears on all three editions, suggesting the truncation of the monument predates even the earliest mapping. The road did not wait for the ringfort to disappear; it simply passed through it.
