Ringfort (Rath), Killeenemer, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Killeenemer, Co. Cork

There is a small circular earthwork in Killeenemer, Co. Cork, that has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it.

Its bank, originally built to enclose a roughly twenty-metre-wide interior, has been pressed into service as part of the field fence system to the north-north-east and south-east, blurring the boundary between ancient monument and modern farm boundary. The fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the outside of the bank, is now waterlogged and has been recut in places as an agricultural drain, shaving back the outer face of the bank in the process. The interior, rather than being left as a discrete enclosed space, serves as a passageway to the south and as a dumping ground to the north.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to the tenth century, and thought to have functioned as a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks. At Killeenemer, the bank still stands to a height of about half a metre on the interior side and just under a metre on the exterior, modest dimensions that speak to either the modest status of whoever built it or to centuries of gradual erosion. Two breaks in the bank, each about five metres wide, one to the east and one to the south-south-west, likely represent original or later entrances, though the one to the south-south-west may account for the interior's continuing use as a thoroughfare. The site sits on a gentle north-north-west-facing slope in pasture land, a setting that is entirely typical of how these sites were chosen and how many have survived, folded into the agricultural landscape rather than preserved apart from it.

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Pete F
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