Ringfort (Rath), Sallypark, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Sallypark, Co. Cork

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or roofless towers.

This one in Sallypark, north County Cork, survives only as a shallow dip in a farmed field, roughly 36 metres across, where something considerably more substantial once stood. It is the kind of place that rewards patience and a certain willingness to read landscape rather than monuments.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1905 both show the site as a hachured circular enclosure, approximately 40 metres in diameter, the standard cartographic shorthand for a ringfort or rath. A rath is a type of enclosed farmstead, typically dating from the early medieval period, built by surrounding a circular area with an earthen bank and an outer ditch, known as a fosse. The 1937 revision of the six-inch map still recorded it clearly, depicting the enclosing fosse as a distinct feature. Sometime around 1974, according to local information, the earthworks were levelled, most likely as the tillage field was brought into more intensive cultivation. What the maps once captured in ink, aerial photography has since traced in soil and crop. One aerial image shows the old fosse as a cropmark, where differential growth in the vegetation above the buried ditch betrays its outline, and a second records the bank as a soilmark, a faint tonal variation in the disturbed earth. Between them, the photographs confirm that the underlying archaeology, though no longer visible as raised ground, has not entirely vanished.

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