Ringfort (Rath), Moyge, Co. Cork

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Ringfort (Rath), Moyge, Co. Cork

A roughly circular patch of raised ground in a pasture field in north Cork is all that remains visible of what was once a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead that would have been home to an early medieval family.

At around 23 metres in diameter, the enclosure is modest even by the standards of these earthworks, and it has not been treated gently by the centuries. The earthen bank that once ringed the interior survives to a height of only about half a metre on the inside and a metre on the outside, and on the western side it has been almost entirely levelled. A gap opens to the north-north-east, and the outer fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have run around the outside, has been filled in to the north-west and south with stone and soil cleared from surrounding fields.

What makes this particular site quietly telling is not so much what survives as what has been lost, and how. The surrounding field fences have been removed, and the enclosure itself has been used as a convenient dump for the resulting clearance material. The fosse, already partially obliterated, was further buried in the process. A lime kiln, a small industrial structure once used to burn limestone for agricultural fertiliser and mortar, was recorded just to the north-north-east on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, but no trace of it remains visible on the ground today. That map gives a precise moment of comparison: in the mid-nineteenth century both features were still distinct enough to be worth marking; in the time since, the landscape around them has been steadily simplified and the earthwork quietly swallowed by the practicalities of working farmland.

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Pete F
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