Ringfort (Rath), Coolroe More, Co. Cork

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Coolroe More, Co. Cork

In the pasture of Coolroe More, on a north-facing slope in County Cork, there is a ringfort that has entirely ceased to exist as anything you could see or touch.

The site is gone at ground level, levelled to the point where no surface trace remains, which places it in an odd category: a place that is archaeologically documented yet visually absent, known only through maps and old fieldwork.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and external ditch, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland and associated with agricultural settlement and livestock management. This one was modest by any measure. When a researcher named Bowman visited in 1934, he recorded a single-ramparted fort of roughly twenty-two yards in diameter, with a bank still standing about three feet high and a fosse, the defensive ditch that would have run around its outer edge, already infilled. Before that, the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map had captured the enclosure as a hachured circle, the standard cartographic shorthand of the time for an earthwork of this kind, at approximately twenty-two metres across. The land at that point belonged to a P. O'Callaghan. By the time the site was formally assessed for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in the late twentieth century, even the remnants Bowman had measured were gone.

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Pete F
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