Ringfort (Rath), Scart, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Scart, Co. Cork

Two gaps in an earthen bank, one to the east and one to the west, suggest that people once walked deliberately through this enclosure rather than simply around it.

The ringfort at Scart in County Cork sits in pasture on a gentle east-facing slope, its circular bank still traceable across the ground even if time and agriculture have reduced it to a low rise no more than 0.6 metres at its highest. The enclosure measures roughly 30 metres across in both directions, and a slight causeway survives at each entrance, the kind of detail that rewards a careful look underfoot.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most consist of a raised circular bank, originally topped with a timber palisade or thorn hedge, surrounding a domestic space where a family kept livestock and built their home. The Scart example was clear enough in 1842 for the Ordnance Survey to record it as a hachured circular enclosure on their six-inch mapping, though by the time of the 1905 and 1936 revisions only an arc of scarp running from the north-east to the south-west was depicted, hinting at how much the earthwork had softened in the intervening decades. A low rise in the north-west quadrant of the interior may represent the remains of a structure, and aerial photography has revealed what could be a second bank running from the north-east to the south, suggesting the site was once more complex than its present surface appearance implies. A second ringfort lies approximately 28 metres to the north-west, which is a notably close pairing and raises the question of whether the two enclosures were ever in use simultaneously or belonged to successive phases of settlement on the same ground.

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