Ringfort (Rath), Tullig More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ringforts
Beneath a west-facing pasture slope in Tullig More, County Cork, lies a ringfort that has essentially vanished from the surface of the earth, yet continues to be documented, measured, and described.
There is nothing to see. No bank, no ditch, no trace of the circular enclosure that once occupied this ground. The site exists now almost entirely in the records of those who visited before the land consumed it.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath or lios, is a type of enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, generally dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They usually consist of a raised earthen bank surrounding a circular interior, often accompanied by an outer ditch. The Tullig More example was apparently a substantial one. Writing in 1918 to 1919, a local observer named O'Leary recorded it as a lios with a fence six feet high and a surrounding trench six feet deep, dimensions that would have made it a reasonably prominent feature in the landscape. Casey, working in 1983, estimated the enclosure at approximately 44.5 metres across in both directions, placing it comfortably within the larger end of the ringfort scale. By that point, however, something had already begun to obscure the picture: the 1933 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the site not as the expected circle but as a hachured L-shaped area, a cartographic curiosity suggesting the surveyors themselves were reading a partially degraded or ambiguous form on the ground. Today, no visible surface trace remains at all.