Ringfort (Rath), Kilnahulla More, Co. Cork

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Ringfort (Rath), Kilnahulla More, Co. Cork

A local tradition attached to this ringfort in Kilnahulla More, north County Cork, holds that three kings once met here, fought, and died of their wounds.

Whether that carries any historical memory or is simply the kind of story that accumulates around prominent earthworks over centuries is impossible to say, but it gives the place an atmosphere that its quiet pasture setting does little to dispel. The fort sits on a south-facing slope just north of the Brogeen River, a roughly circular enclosure measuring around 36.5 metres east to west and 32.5 metres north to south, its interior raised on the southern side to level out the natural hillslope. The western half is overgrown with ferns, and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind typically associated with early medieval settlement, lies just outside the enclosure to the north-north-east.

The earthworks themselves are a double-banked affair, with an inner bank, an intervening fosse or ditch, and an outer bank, though the outer circuit is incomplete to the north-west. When Bowman recorded the site in 1934, he described it as trivallate, meaning it once had three ramparts, and noted that only about one-sixth of the outermost bank was still visible even then. The surviving banks are modest in height, the inner reaching about a metre on its interior face and the outer standing roughly 1.1 metres externally, but the overall form of the rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, remains legible in the landscape. Ringforts of this type were the typical farmstead enclosures of early medieval Ireland, built to protect livestock and household rather than to serve any grand military function, which makes the three-kings legend feel all the more incongruous and, perhaps, all the more persistent for it.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1904 and 1937 both show a footpath crossing the site, which local knowledge identifies as a former shortcut to the nearby village of Boherboy. That path has long since fallen out of use, leaving the fort to its pasture and its ferns.

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