Ringfort (Rath), Templebodan, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Templebodan, Co. Cork

Sitting in open pasture on a terrace above a northeast-facing slope in Templebodan, this earthwork has been quietly holding its shape for well over a thousand years.

It is nearly circular, measuring roughly 32 metres north to south and just over 30 metres east to west, and what gives it away as something deliberate and ancient is the bank that rings it: a wall of compacted earth standing 1.8 metres above the interior and 2.5 metres above the ground outside. A slight depression around the exterior marks what remains of a fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure, and a narrow gap in the bank to the northeast served, at some point, as an entrance.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish landscape. Ringforts were typically farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, where a family and their livestock lived within a defended enclosure. The earthen bank was not a fortification in any military sense but a boundary, a marker of status and ownership, and a means of keeping animals in and predators out. The interior here is still level, which is typical of a well-preserved example, though a possible plough scarp on the internal face of the bank hints at later agricultural activity, a sign that at some point the enclosed space was cultivated rather than left as a yard or settlement area. The survival of the fosse, even in slight traces, adds to the picture of a site that has weathered centuries of farming without being entirely obliterated.

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Pete F
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