Ringfort (Rath), Rossline, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rossline, Co. Cork

There is nothing obviously ancient to see at Rossline in north County Cork.

The field is pasture, the slope is gentle, and what was once a ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or high-status residence in early medieval Ireland, has been levelled almost entirely flat. What remains is a circular depression roughly 39 metres across and a shallow fosse, the ditch that once ran around the outside of the bank, now barely legible in the grass. The structure has not dramatically crumbled or been dramatically quarried; it has simply been absorbed, slowly, by agricultural land.

The site has a reasonably well-documented paper trail, which makes its present near-invisibility all the more interesting to trace. It appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937, each time rendered as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographic shorthand of the era for an earthwork of this kind. By 1934, when a researcher named Bowman recorded it, the fort was already described as levelled, its single rampart gone, measuring approximately 35 yards in diameter, and sitting on land belonging to a Mr Fox. The slight discrepancy between Bowman's figure and the later measurement of around 39 metres is the sort of small inconsistency that accumulates over decades of resurveying and rounding. An aerial photograph has since captured the ghost of the structure as a cropmark, the buried fosse and bank causing the grass above to grow at a slightly different rate, making the outline briefly visible from the air in the right season and light conditions.

For anyone walking the land, the site would require knowing exactly what to look for. The fosse is shallow rather than dramatic, and the enclosure itself is grassed over. In dry summers, when cropmarks are most legible, the circular outline has the best chance of showing itself, though only from above would it read clearly as the form it once was.

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Pete F
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