Ringfort (Rath), Powerstown, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
What makes this particular patch of North Cork pasture quietly arresting is not what you can see so much as what you can barely see.
A roughly circular enclosure, measuring around 30 metres east to west and 26 metres north to south, survives here as little more than a low earthen rise, rising just 0.1 metres above the surrounding ground. A shallow external fosse, a defensive ditch that once reinforced the enclosure's bank, survives to the west and north, though it has been reduced to a depth of only 0.4 metres. A possible entrance opening to the south is the one feature that hints at the daily life once organised within this space.
Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household. They were built in their thousands between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, and their circular earthworks were formed by throwing up a bank from the material dug out of the surrounding fosse. Most were never grand structures; their significance lay in defining a domestic and agricultural space rather than in providing serious military defence. The example at Powerstown is modest even by these standards, its enclosing bank now barely perceptible underfoot. A field boundary has been laid along the outer edge of the fosse from the west-southwest around to the north, meaning the landscape of later farming has folded itself around the older monument. What makes the setting particularly unusual is the immediate company this ringfort keeps: a second ringfort lies approximately 70 metres to the north-northeast, and a moated site, a type of enclosed medieval settlement more commonly associated with Anglo-Norman lords and dating from the twelfth century onwards, sits roughly 70 metres to the north-northwest. Three distinct phases of enclosed settlement, early medieval Irish and later medieval, occupying the same gentle east-facing slope within a few dozen metres of one another.