Ringfort (Rath), Moneygurney, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
At Moneygurney in County Cork, there is a place that no longer quite exists.
A ringfort once stood here, a rath, which is a type of circular earthen enclosure used in early medieval Ireland typically as a farmstead, defined by one or more banks and ditches. It is gone now, levelled into the rough grazing land around it, leaving nothing obvious on the surface to suggest what was once there.
The site is known primarily because it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appeared as a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter. That map, produced as part of one of the most thorough topographic surveys of nineteenth-century Ireland, caught the feature at a moment when it was still legible in the landscape. Walsh, writing in 1985, catalogued it among the earthworks of the region, and excavation work recorded in 2001 added a further layer of documentation. By the time those later records were compiled, the physical structure had already been lost to agricultural levelling, a fate that has befallen a significant proportion of Ireland's ringforts over the past two centuries.
What remains is, in a sense, the record rather than the place. The 1842 map becomes the closest thing to a visit anyone can now make, a cartographic ghost of an enclosure that sheltered early medieval life somewhere beneath what is now ordinary grazing ground in east Cork.