Ringfort (Rath), Kippane, Co. Cork

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Ringfort (Rath), Kippane, Co. Cork

In the corner of a field in Kippane, County Cork, a slight swelling in the pasture is almost all that remains of a structure that once organised the life of an early medieval family or small community.

To an untrained eye it reads as nothing more than an uneven patch of ground, but it is the ghost of a rath, a type of ringfort consisting of a circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and a shallow external ditch known as a fosse. Thousands of these were built across Ireland, largely between the sixth and tenth centuries, serving as enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications. This one has been levelled, absorbed into the surrounding field system, its bank reduced and its ditch partially filled in.

A survey carried out by the Office of Public Works in December 1981 recorded what was still measurable at the time: a roughly circular area of about twenty-two metres in diameter, bounded by a low earthen bank standing approximately half a metre in height, with a narrow fosse running around the outside and the interior ground sloping gently down towards the south-south-east. By the time more recent assessments were made, even that modest profile had been further diminished. What survives is a scarp running from the north-east to the south-east, incorporated now into the modern field fence, with the remnant fosse still reaching a depth of around half a metre in places. The rath sits in undulating pasture in the south-east corner of the field, and the noticeable rise in the ground there is the clearest sign that something deliberate and human once shaped this particular patch of earth.

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