Ringfort (Rath), Kilmona, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilmona, Co. Cork

There is a ringfort at Kilmona in County Cork that you cannot see.

No earthwork, no bank, no trace of a circular enclosure survives above the grass. And yet the site was there, faithfully recorded on Ordnance Survey maps across nearly a century, a hachured ring roughly forty metres across sitting on a west-facing slope in what is now ordinary pasture.

A rath, as ringforts of this type are commonly known, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. This one appeared on OS six-inch maps in 1842, again in 1904, and again in 1938, each survey finding it still intact enough to plot. Sometime around 1963, according to local information, it was levelled. The land was agricultural, the enclosure presumably an inconvenience, and so it went the way of thousands of similar sites across the country during the mid-twentieth century, when field clearance and farm improvement schemes erased a considerable portion of Ireland's visible early medieval landscape. What makes this particular disappearance quietly interesting is the coda: in 1986, an aerial photograph taken as part of the Cambridge Air Survey of Archaeological Photographs captured the ghost of the rath as a soil mark, the buried ditch and disturbed ground still registering as a faint circular stain from above, invisible at ground level but legible from the sky.

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