Ringfort (Rath), Lonagh, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lonagh, Co. Cork

What looks like an ordinary pasture field in Lonagh, in the west of County Cork, turns out to conceal the faint but legible outline of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, those circular or near-circular earthen enclosures that were once the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland.

The site sits on a break in a south-facing slope, and whoever chose this ground did so with some care, as such positions typically offered both drainage and a degree of natural visibility. The enclosure, roughly subcircular in plan and measuring approximately 39 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, has been absorbed into a square field of broadly similar dimensions, a coincidence of shape that may explain why the boundaries have survived at all, the modern field essentially inheriting the footprint of the ancient one.

The earthworks themselves are subtle rather than dramatic. On the western side, the original bank has been largely levelled, surviving only as a slight rise along the inside of the field fence. To the east and south, a scarp up to 1.35 metres high remains, with a faint internal lip still visible, the ghost of the bank's inner face. Attached to the site is a local tradition of a souterrain in the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, commonly associated with ringforts and thought to have served as a place of refuge or cool storage during the early medieval period. The souterrain here carries its own separate record, though whether it survives intact beneath the pasture is not documented in what is currently known about the site.

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Pete F
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