Ringfort (Rath), Newtown, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Newtown, Co. Cork

A field boundary cuts clean through the middle of this ringfort near Newtown in North Cork, and the eastern half of the enclosure is simply gone, levelled in 1984 according to local accounts.

What survives on the western side of the fence is enough to read, if you know what to look for: a raised area roughly twenty metres across, held in by a scarp that rises to about 1.6 metres, with the faint depression of an outer fosse, a shallow defensive ditch, still traceable to the south-west. A railway line runs directly along the north-western edge of the site at a lower level, so the fort sits between two kinds of boundary, one ancient, one industrial.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined primarily by an earthen bank and ditch rather than stone, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. This one was still substantially intact when the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1842, appearing as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of around thirty metres. By the time later OS editions appeared, in 1905 and 1937, the recorded diameter had reduced to about twenty metres, suggesting that erosion or agricultural pressure had already been softening the outline for decades before the more deliberate clearance in 1984. The bisecting field boundary, which runs north to south slightly off-centre to the east, may itself have contributed to the gradual loss of the eastern portion over time.

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Pete F
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