Ringfort (Rath), Lyradane, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lyradane, Co. Cork

A curving earthen bank on a south-facing slope above the Lyradane stream is all that outwardly announces one of the older forms of human settlement in the Irish landscape.

What survives here is a rath, a type of ringfort that would originally have comprised a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of domestic refuge. This one, when it was still more or less intact, measured around 35 metres in diameter, a modest but typical size for such sites across Munster.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the enclosure as a complete circle, which gives a useful baseline for understanding how much has been lost in the intervening centuries. Today, an arc of earthen bank running west to east, measuring just under 40 metres in length, is what remains. The inner face of the bank still stands to about 1.7 metres in height, while the outer face rises to roughly a metre, and at the foot of that inner face there is a faint shallow depression, possibly the ghost of the original fosse or ditch that would once have run around the interior edge. The surviving bank has been absorbed into the field boundary system over time, a common fate for such monuments in agricultural land, and a drain outside the north-western section follows the line of the field fence westward. The site sits in pasture, and the landscape has quietly grown around and over it, leaving just enough visible to suggest what was once a complete and carefully constructed enclosure.

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