Ringfort (Rath), Lisheenafeela, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lisheenafeela, Co. Cork

On a hill in Lisheenafeela, in north County Cork, there is a ringfort that has almost erased itself from the landscape.

Aerial photography taken in the late 1990s suggests that what was once a coherent earthwork was levelled around that time, leaving behind only the ghost of what had stood there for well over a thousand years.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They consist of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and served as farmsteads for individual families. The example at Lisheenafeela sat atop a hill in pasture and was measurably substantial before its destruction: the interior measured around 27 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south, with an earthen bank rising roughly 1.6 metres on its exterior face. Gaps in the bank to the northeast and north-northwest, likely cattle gaps, hint at the way the site had been absorbed into working farmland long before it disappeared entirely. The bank itself had become heavily overgrown and was incorporated into the surrounding field fence system along its southern side. Within the enclosed space, coniferous trees had been planted at some point, with the interior ground surface uneven, the northern half roughly level and the southern half sitting higher and sloping down toward the north.

What remains today is, by all accounts, very little. The best-preserved section of the bank once ran from east around to the northwest, but given the levelling that appears to have occurred, even that partial survival may now be difficult to read on the ground. The site is in private pasture, and the conifer planting, the absorbed fencelines, and the probable loss of the main earthwork mean that any visible trace would require a careful eye and some knowledge of what to look for.

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