Ringfort (Rath), Rooves More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
In the pastureland of Rooves More, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in a field, its double banks and intervening ditch still legible in the landscape after more than a thousand years.
The rath, as this type of ringfort is known when constructed from earth rather than stone, measures around 36.5 metres across, and its two banks rise to about a metre in height, softened now by furze bushes that have colonised the rims. A causewayed entrance to the south-west breaks the circuit, the point where animals and people once passed in and out of what would have been an enclosed farmstead.
Raths are among the most common early medieval monuments in Ireland, typically associated with the period between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, when individual farming families built such enclosures to protect livestock and establish a degree of social standing in the landscape. What makes this particular example a little more interesting is the souterrain recorded in its interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, usually dug beneath or beside a domestic settlement, and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. Their construction required considerable effort, which suggests the people living here had resources worth protecting. Outside the enclosure to the north-east, four stones arranged in a line may be the remnants of a field boundary shown on the 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a detail noted by P. J. Hartnett in 1939, and a reminder that the land around the fort was actively managed well into the modern era, with older boundaries persisting in the ground long after they ceased to appear on working maps.