Ringfort (Rath), Knockburden, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knockburden, Co. Cork

The earthwork at Knockburden has been levelled to the point where no bank or ditch rises above the surrounding pasture, yet the site has not entirely disappeared.

A ring of noticeably darker, richer grass traces a circle roughly 23.5 metres across, marking where the old enclosure once stood. This kind of crop or vegetation mark is a common way that ploughed or levelled raths, the Irish ringforts that served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, continue to announce themselves long after the physical structure has gone.

Earlier observers caught the site in better condition. P. J. Hartnett, writing in 1939, recorded a single rampart enclosing a circular area of 91 feet in diameter, with a second and third bank still surviving in the south-west quadrant. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 shows a hachured circular enclosure, the conventional symbol for an earthwork of this kind, with what appears to be a quarry cut into the ground just outside the northern bank and a possible outer bank running from south to north-west. By the time the same sheet was revised in 1903 and again in 1940, the northern bank had gone, though a second line running south to west was still plotted outside the first. The sequence of maps charts a gradual erasure across roughly a century, from a feature with multiple banks to a shadow in the grass.

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