Ringfort (Rath), Ring, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
On an east-facing slope above Youghal Bay in County Cork, there is a ringfort that is, in a practical sense, no longer there.
What survives is the ghost of it: a low rise to the north and northeast, a slight scarp to the east, and the memory of a boundary that once enclosed a roughly oval area of around fifty metres east to west and sixty metres north to south. According to local information, the earthwork was levelled sometime in the 1930s, leaving the land to rough pasture and the feature to the cartographic record.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. This one was substantial enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, which means that even a century before its levelling, it was a recognisable presence in the landscape. The oval outline captured by those surveyors represents a site that had likely stood for well over a thousand years before someone decided, in the mid-twentieth century, that the ground would serve better without it. That kind of clearance was not unusual in Ireland during the early decades of intensive agricultural improvement, when ancient earthworks were understood more as obstacles than as archives.
