Ringfort (Rath), Kilgobnet, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilgobnet, Co. Cork

Part of this ringfort has been quietly doing roadside duty for decades, absorbed into a boundary fence along the verge without most passers-by having any idea what they are leaning against.

The earthen bank that forms the western to north-north-eastern arc of the enclosure is no longer a freestanding archaeological feature but a working piece of field infrastructure, its original purpose entirely obscured by its second career as a property line.

A rath, the Irish term for this class of monument, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period and used primarily as a farmstead or settlement. This one sits on a north-north-east-facing slope near Kilgobnet in County Cork, measuring approximately 42.5 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and 40 metres across the other way. Where the bank survives best, on the western to northern side, it still rises to an external height of 2.3 metres. Elsewhere it has been reduced to a low swell, and the external fosse, the ditch dug to throw up the bank in the first place, survives only as a faint depression to the south and west. Aerial photography has revealed more than is visible on the ground, showing the ghost of a levelled bank and what may be the trace of a second outer rampart to the south-west, suggesting this was once a more substantial double-banked enclosure. Bowman, writing in 1934, recorded it as precisely that: a levelled double-ramparted fort of around 38 metres in diameter, then on land belonging to a P. O'Callaghan. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a lime kiln inside the southern bank and a second one just outside the enclosure to the south-west, though neither leaves any surface trace today. A lime kiln was a small stone or earthen structure used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for agricultural or building purposes, and their presence here suggests the interior of the fort was being put to practical use well into the nineteenth century, with whatever remained of the ancient earthworks treated as convenient raw material or simply ignored.

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