Ringfort (Rath), Mountnorth, Co. Cork

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Ringfort (Rath), Mountnorth, Co. Cork

A ringfort that no longer exists above ground can still leave a remarkably legible trace, and the one at Mountnorth in north Cork is a case in point.

Levelled around 1967 according to local memory, the earthwork had endured on a north-east-facing pasture slope for well over a thousand years before being cleared away in a single agricultural intervention. What remains now is largely invisible to the casual eye, but the site has not entirely disappeared.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937 all show the same hachured circular enclosure, roughly fifty metres in diameter, sitting consistently in the same field across nearly a century of cartographic record. The structure was bivallate, meaning it was defined by two concentric banks and their accompanying ditches, or fosses, rather than the single bank more commonly associated with a simple rath. This double-circuit arrangement is generally taken to indicate either higher status or a need for more substantial enclosure, though without excavation it is impossible to say which applied here. After levelling, aerial photography revealed the outlines of those fosses as cropmarks, the buried ditches causing the grass or grain above them to grow differently and so sketch out the original plan from the air. On the ground, a north-south field fence running along what was the western side of the enclosure still shows a slight curve at the relevant point, and stone footings are exposed at its base, but the fence line does not precisely follow the arc of the original bank. It seems the modern boundary absorbed the site rather than faithfully tracing it.

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